Black Holes: Racism and Ignorance

By Victor M Fontane

In 1930, a physics student at the University of Madras named Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar embarked on a voyage by ship to England. He was barely 20 years old, had a scholarship he had won thanks to two scientific articles, and had many hours of solitude.

The racism of the British passengers, who prevented their children from playing with him, confined him to the deck with nothing but paper, pencil, and his restless mind. There, reading Bohr, Heisenberg, and Schrödinger, he began to calculate the ultimate fate of stars.

He discovered that white dwarfs, the exhausted cores of stars, could only be stable if their mass was less than 1.44 times that of the Sun. Above this limit—now known as the Chandrasekhar limit—no force could stop the collapse. The star would collapse into itself, forming what we now call black holes.

His idea was ridiculed at Cambridge. Ralph Fowler, his supervisor, dismissed it. And Arthur Eddington, the leading authority of the time, publicly attacked him. But Chandrasekhar persisted and published his work in 1931. Decades later, the universe confirmed his calculations.

In 1983, he received the Nobel Prize in Physics, not only for his research on black holes, but also for that calculation, carried out alone, on a ship bound for England, with the breeze of the Arabian Sea and discrimination as his companions.

That dark-skinned young man, rejected from the deck, had foreseen one of the deepest mysteries of the cosmos: that even the giant, brilliant stars are doomed to die... and some, to disappear in an endless collapse.