Empire of the Stars; Obsession, Friendship, and Betrayal in the Quest for Black Holes

Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. Jerry Bauer (Author Photograph). xx, 364 pages. Illustrations. Appendix A: The Ongoing tale of Sirius B. Appendix B. Updating the Supernova Story. Notes. Bibliography. Biographical Sketches. Glossary. Index. Arthur I. Miller is Emeritus Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at University College London. From 1991 to 2005 he was Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at University College London. He was instrumental in developing the UK's first undergraduate single honours BSc degree in History and Philosophy of Science, at UCL. Derived from a Kirkus review: The harsh lesson learned by 20-year-old prodigy Subrahmanyan Chandrasekha, on Jan. 11, 1935, was when heannounced before the august Royal Astronomical Society in London his discovery that certain oversized stars would inexorably collapse into themselves to the point of nothingness. The most renowned British astrophysicist of the day, Sir Arthur Eddington ridiculed the finding, setting off a feud with Chandra that effectively halted his work for 40 years. Miller focuses on Chandra's struggle to overcome the setback. He introduces us to astrophysics research from the 1930s to the present. The portraits of Teller, Oppenheimer and Bohr, along with others, are fascinating as we follow their gaze from the stars deep in space to the microcosmos of atomic particles. Their realization that could be found in the protons and electrons of the atom led to breathtaking discoveries—finally affirming Chandra's theory on "black holes" as well as on the creation of the atomic and hydrogen bombs. This is still dense reading, but the rewards are many and profound. In August 1930, on a voyage from Madras to London, a young Indian looked up at the stars and contemplated their fate. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar--Chandra, as he was called--calculated that certain stars would suffer a strange and violent death, collapsing to virtually nothing. This extraordinary claim, the first mathematical description of black holes, brought Chandra into direct conflict with Sir Arthur Eddington, one of the greatest astrophysicists of the day. Eddington ridiculed the young man's idea at a meeting of the Royal Astronomy Society in 1935, sending Chandra into an intellectual and emotional tailspin--and hindering the progress of astrophysics for nearly forty years. Empire of the Stars is the dramatic story of this intellectual debate and its implications for twentieth-century science. Arthur I. Miller traces the idea of black holes from early notions of "dark stars" to the modern concepts of wormholes, quantum foam, and baby universes. In the process, he follows the rise of two great theories--relativity and quantum mechanics--that meet head on in black holes. Empire of the Stars provides a unique window into the remarkable quest to understand how stars are born, how they live, and, most portentously (for their fate is ultimately our own), how they die. It is also the moving tale of one man's struggle against the establishment--an episode that sheds light on what science is, how it works, and where it can go wrong. Miller exposes the deep-seated prejudices that plague even the most rational minds. Indeed, it took the nuclear arms race to persuade scientists to revisit Chandra's work from the 1930s, for the core of a hydrogen bomb resembles nothing so much as an exploding star. Only then did physicists realize the relevance, truth, and importance of Chandra's work, which was finally awarded a Nobel Prize in 1983. Set against the waning days of the British Empire and taking us right up to the present, this sweeping history examines the quest to understand one of the most forbidding phenomena in the universe, as well as the passions that fueled that quest over the course of a century.