The Joy of Why - From Sidedoor — Cosmic Journey I: "Stellar Buffoonery"

Episode Date: September 19, 2024

As a treat to our listeners, we are posting a full episode of Sidedoor, a podcast that explores the treasures in the Smithsonian's vaults. Subscribe to Sidedoor from Smithsonian wherever you listen to podcasts!Black holes could unlock the mysteries of creation and live at the heart of nearly every galaxy. But these invisible balls of extremely dense matter have never been fully understood, especially when they were only a theory. We travel through a cosmic wormhole back to the 1930s to learn how the first astrophysicist to successfully theorize a black hole, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, was ridiculed and rejected by his scientific community.

Daniel and Jorge explain the universe is a podcast about, well, everything in the universe. Do you want to understand what science knows about how the universe began and what mysteries remain? Are you curious about what lies inside a black hole? And if we'll ever know, Daniel is a physicist working at CERN who actually knows what he's talking about. And Jorge asks all the questions that pop up in your mind as you listen to make sure everything is crystal clear. Listen to Daniel and Jorge explain the universe on the iHeartRadioApple podcast

or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there, side door bowls. I wanna start today's show with a quote. Ahem. Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the former. Albert Einstein said that, and I think it's relevant to today's episode. Enjoy.

This is Side Door, a podcast from the Smithsonian with support from PRX. I'm Lizzie Peabody. There's a photograph that plastered the front pages of almost every newspaper in April 2019. It looked like a glowing orange circle, a ring of fire against a dark background. And it set scientists around the world all at izzy. It's a true, like, a eureka moment in our scientific lives. We're looking at this, the mystery of nature

that has never uncovered, right? I've been dreaming about this for 25 years. When I first saw it, it was such, such an amazing moment. Kimberly Arkand was one of those scientists. Because, you know, it kind of, it looks kind of like a donut dressed up for Halloween, right? With its orange frosting, right? And it looks kind of tasty.

Where Kim sees a donut, I see something a little less enticing. I feel like it looks a little ominous. It's got a sort of like Eye of Sauron from Lord of the Rings feeling to it. Yeah, well, I mean, I think they have a bad rap. I think black holes are sort of known as these giant cosmic vacuum cleaners, like these cosmic Roombas starting through our sky. And I think that's a little bit of a bad rap. Black holes, they get a bad rap. And Kim would know. She's been studying ways to visualize black holes

at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory at Harvard since the 1990s. She says, no, they are not a portal to another dimension, as far as we know. Or like I used to think as a kid, some invisible gaping maw roaming around the universe, sucking up everything in its path and disappearing it. Now don't get me wrong,

I really would not want to be close to one. You don't want to be spaghettified by one. Kim says black holes are actually massively important to the creation of not just our galaxy but nearly every galaxy. Black holes I think are really important to help us understand how galaxies like our own, the Milky Way, came to be. Astronomers also think they can tell us some of like the essential rules of the universe.

Black holes could unlock the mysteries of creation, but to learn more about them, we have to find them. Not such an easy thing, because... Black holes are invisible, right? So that's the conundrum. Like, how do you find them, right? How do you search for them? That's why this first image of supermassive black hole M87 is so impressive. In 2019, this photograph made the invisible visible, so that we can see with our own eyes

the thing that a hundred years ago, the world's leading physicists claimed was impossible, could not exist. Well, every physicist except one. So this time on Side Door, we're celebrating the Black Hole Hunter. And the guy it's named for. This year marks the 25th anniversary of a telescope that has transformed our vision of space. The Chandra X-ray Observatory. It's a two-part journey across the universe in search of black holes, the good, the bad, and the spaghetti.

In part two, we'll get into what we get wrong about black holes, how they work, and what there's left to find out. But first, we start our journey traveling through a wormhole back to the 1930s to see why the first person to successfully theorize a black hole found himself pulled into a feud of supernova proportions. That's coming up after the break. If you're outside, I want you to look towards the sun, not at it, just in that direction. Feel its presence, the heat on your face, how you have to squint because its light is literally blinding.

Now think about this, that flaming ball in the sky is 93 million miles away. And this big ball of gas is creating so much energy, I cannot even wrap my head around it. Our sun generates a thousand trillion kilowatts per year. This is about 300 times the current energy consumption per year of humankind. This is Arthur I. Miller, an emeritus professor

at University College London, and author of the book, Empire of the Stars, Friendship, Obsession, and Betrayal in the Quest for Black Holes. He says our sun can't go on creating energy forever. Someday, just like everything else, it will die. So what happens when the sun, or any other star, dies? In 1926, Britain's top minds were calculating the answer to this exact question.

Sir Arthur Eddington and Ralph Fowler were two of the world's leading astrophysicists in the early 1900s. They taught at Cambridge University, and they had a theory about what happens when a star dies. Think of it this way. A star is a bunch of exploding gas battling against gravity. As the explosive energy pushes out, gravity pushes back. And eventually, the star reaches a point where it can't push out anymore, and gravity can't

push in anymore, and the star stops expanding and stays the same size, just like our sun. But a dying star is no longer creating all that energy, and without this energy pushing out, gravity starts to crush the star down on itself. It would be like you crumpling up a piece of paper into a dense little ball. In astrophysics, this collapsed, dead star is known as a white dwarf. And in 1926, Eddington and Fowler looked at these white dwarfs and said, well, theoretically, gravity should keep crushing these dying stars into nothing. But…

It was preposterous to imagine that something as big as a star could disappear. It can't. It's just too big to disappear. I mean, some stars can be 1,000 times the size of our sun. So the idea that something so big and massive could just become nothing was unthinkable. So Eddington said, I've got it. This must mean that the mass of a dying star can only be compressed so much. After that, it stops.

It's like the piece of paper you crushed into a ball. No matter how hard you try and how small you get that ball of paper, there's still going to be a small ball of mass. Even if it's the size of a tic-tac. And a white dwarf is like that tic-tac. It's the smallest a star could be compressed. So Sir Arthur Eddington and Ralph Fowler dusted off their hands, case closed. The final fate of a star has been established. Four years later, in 1930, a young physicist from India named Subramanyan Chandrasekhar was standing on the deck of a ship, feeling the warmth of the sun on his cheeks. Next to him is a chair piled high with physics books.

He's full of optimism. He's going to one of the great centers of learning in the Western world, Cambridge University. Chandra, as he liked to be called, was 19 years old, a prodigy back in India, on his way to study the stars with the famous Ralph Fowler. He had just finished studying for finals back in India, and now he finally had some time to dig into some of Fowler's work before meeting him face-to-face in Cambridge. But as he was reading some of Fowler's papers, he noticed something.

He found to his complete surprise that Fowler had missed the boat, so to speak. Fowler had made a boat, so to speak. Fowler had made a miscalculation on the death of a star, and Chandra said, wait a second. And he started doing some math in his head. What happened next probably took about 10 minutes. Chandra calculated that a star with a mass slightly larger than our sun won't stop collapsing once it reaches the white dwarf stage.

Instead, they will go on collapsing forever. This is exactly what Eddington and Fowler said wouldn't happen. The laws of physics didn't allow for anything to be infinite. But mathematically speaking, Chandra knew he was right. He had discovered a black hole, a star which continues to collapse. Chandra was giddy. He was sure this finding would impress his new professor. And it would impress Eddington to no end as well. But what happened, of course, was something quite different. Of all the stars in Chandra's world, Sir Arthur Eddington was the biggest.

Chandra had devoured Eddington's book, The Internal Constitution of Stars, back in India, when he was just 17. I mean, Eddington wasn't just a major player in astrophysics up until the late 1930s. Eddington grew up poor, raised by a single mother. And as a kid, he could often be found outside, trying to count the stars in the night sky. He knew the only way he could afford school was to study and earn scholarships, which he did, earning degree after degree. His hard work rocketed him to success.

He became the director of the Cambridge Observatory. He was knighted by King George. He was a recipient of just about every award that science could offer. His books are considered masterpieces of exposition. And of course, he verified Einstein's general relativity theory in 1919, which made Einstein a household name. Really, he helped make Einstein a household name?

Yes. Einstein had come up with the theory of general relativity in 1915. And among other things, it explains how large objects in the universe will actually curve and bend gravity, almost like placing a bowling ball in the center of a mattress. If Einstein were right, then light traveling past a massive object, like the Sun, should bend due to the Sun's immense gravity.

So during a solar eclipse in 1919, Sir Arthur Eddington saw an opportunity to put Einstein's theory to the test. With the sun's light blocked by the moon, Eddington measured the position of stars usually blocked by the sun's blinding light. What he saw shocked him. When the light from those stars passed by the sun, they were in slightly different places than when the sun was shining. He could see evidence that light bent around the sun. Einstein was right.

That took all the headlines. Wow. Einstein's theory verified. So, Eddington was brilliant and knew it. In no sense of the term was this man humble. There's a story that a fellow physicist was explaining Einstein's theory of relativity to the Royal Astronomical Society. And after his talk, this scientist saw Eddington and approached him. And he said something like, by God, Eddington, I think there are only three men in the world who understand this theory, the others being Einstein and you.

The scientist grinned and waited for Eddington to respond. But Eddington stayed silent until the man said, come on, don't be shy. And then Eddington said, no, I was just waiting to hear who the third person might be. He was haughty and brutal and funny and in spite of it all, very popular with his peers. And his crown jewel was his theory of everything. It explained the fundamental physics of the physical world. He called it his, wait for it, fundamental theory. And this fundamental theory made it clear that

the laws of physics did not allow for singularities. Whenever the word infinite comes up in physics, it means there's a singularity. And a black hole, by definition, is a singularity, a star that is infinitely collapsing on itself. And if you're thinking, what do you mean infinitely collapsing on itself? And if you're thinking, what do you mean infinitely collapsing on itself? Where does the stuff go?

You're not alone. Einstein himself was like, hold up. He thought it was mathematically elegant, but he didn't believe that it might even correspond to real objects in the universe, right? I mean... Really? Absolutely, yeah, yeah.

Priyamvada Natarajan is an astrophysicist and professor at Yale. She says even though Einstein's theory opened the door for the possibility of black holes, He himself was resistant to the idea of black holes only because of the properties of the solution. And Eddington felt even more strongly about it than Einstein did. Nothing is infinite, he said. Even if the math said a star could keep on collapsing itself forever, Eddington believed that...

Somewhere, somehow nature would just intervene. He just found the idea abominable. Actually, that is a phrase he has used, abominable. Eddington wrote, space itself is perhaps finite, and the explorer must one day stay his conquering march for lack of fresh realms to invade. I find this choice of invade to be particularly telling of the times. See, in the early 1900s, Britain hadn't yet stayed its own conquering march of the world,

and India was under British rule, an area known as the British Raj extended across present-day India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. And this is where Subramanyan Chandra Sekhar was born in 1910. Chandra grew up in a very privileged, educated family, extremely well-educated family in India that was also quite Anglicized. His father was in the Indian Civil Service. It was a big deal in railroads.

Chandra wanted to be a mathematician. But his father forbade him because his father felt there were not employment opportunities out there. He should go into the civil service. They settled on physics because Chandra's father thought that was sort of like engineering. He graduated at the top of his class from Presidency College, the best institution in South India. Chandra was widely considered to be a prodigy in India,

and he was accepted to earn his PhD at Cambridge in 1930. But even though he came from a privileged, anglicized family and had all these achievements, Chandra was well aware of his place in the British Empire. So when you grew up as a colonial subject, I suspect he knew there were two different worlds, the world of the colonial subjects and the world of the subjugators.

By way of illustration, the same year Chandra was accepted to Cambridge, he was traveling home after giving a lecture in Allahabad. And he was feeling good. He was traveling home after giving a lecture in Allahabad. And he was feeling good. He was one of the most celebrated Indian physicists at only age 19. He was preparing to study with the world's leading astrophysicists. Then he was rudely reminded that he was just another Indian in the Raj.

And this occurred when he boarded the train to go back to Madras. Chandra always rode in the first class train because his father worked for the railroad. On this particular trip, a British couple boarded the train and saw Chandra sitting there. The woman marched up to the conductor and complained that an Indian was in first class. She was quite loud that she felt uncomfortable

sharing a first class carriage with an Indian. And she went on and on and finally said, well, at least this guy is wearing Western garb. At which point, Chandra was so infuriated that he got up and left. But he wasn't away for long. He'd just gone to change clothes. And came back wearing a South Indian veste, a South Indian outfit. Oh my gosh. A South Indian outfit. Bold move. That's right. This really made the woman mad. She started screaming at the conductor.

The woman said that, if you don't get him out of the carriage and hit the second class, then I'm going to pull this emergency cord, which she did. She said, I'm going to pull it every time the train moves, unless he's out of the carriage and into a second class carriage. The conductor asked if Chandra might be convinced to move, Every time the train moves, unless he's out of the carriage and into a second-class carriage. The conductor asked if Chandra might be convinced to move, you know, just to keep the train moving.

But Chandra was like, no. And eventually the British couple left instead. Chandra later wrote in his diary, They moved to another compartment, second-class or something, I don't know. Soon after, Chandra boarded a ship bound for the United Kingdom. He was ready to start his graduate studies at Cambridge University, excited to present his new theory about the fate of stars to his heroes. What happened next after the break? In 1930, the young Subramanyan Chandrasekhar arrived in his new home of Cambridge, excited to study alongside his

astrophysicist heroes Ralph Fowler and Sir Arthur Eddington to share his own theories about the fate of stars. One of them was the Chandra Mass. Who was she considered to be the most important? The Chandra Mass was the theory that he came up with on the boat ride from India. And you might have noticed that some people say Chandra and others say Chandra. He actually went by both names.

And Chandra's theory said that a star with a little more mass than our sun, 1.4 times to be precise, could keep collapsing forever. Basically the opposite of what Eddington and Fowler had theorized. But Fowler showed little interest in it and in fact passed it along to a colleague, Edward Arthur Milne. Chandra kind of got the brush off.

But despite the chilly reception from Fowler, he was excited to meet the famous Sir Arthur Eddington, although the feeling was not mutual. So in 1930, when Chandra arrived in England, Eddington was at the height of his fame. And then this dark-skinned Indian youngster arrives and threatened to ruin it all.

Chandra's idea of a collapse to a black hole interfered with his own sort of competing ideas that he had for the end states of stars. Chandra never gave up on his theory during his early years in Cambridge. And as he reached the end of his graduate thesis, Sir Eddington learned of Chandra's hot take on white dwarfs and how this threatened his fundamental theory. He also learned that Chandra wanted to present his theory to the Royal Astronomical Society. Every month, the Royal Astronomical Society

had a meeting which was packed out, and in front sat all the big guns of British astrophysics. Think of this meeting as a monthly boxing match where newbies would come take on the champs, Mike Tyson, Oscar De La Hoya and George Foreman. It was the astronomical equivalent to that level of talent and name recognition. And Sir Arthur Eddington was like the Muhammad Ali of these events. A lot of people came just to see these battles. Oh wow.

To be clear, the meetings weren't actually physically violent, but they were bloody brutal. You present the 15-minute paper and then there would be a Q&A session. This Q&A session basically amounted to other scientists trying to tear your theory apart and maybe even destroy you in the process. — Korea's ruined, ego's demolished. — Like screaming and and yelling and... — Yes, that's right. — Brandishing of canes kind of a thing? — Almost.

— Eddington knew people were trying to knock him off the throne by disproving his fundamental theory. And that's what he thought Chandra was going to do if he presented at one of these meetings. Eddington felt there was a battle for his life. A sort of dance ensued. Eddington didn't dissuade Chandra. In fact, quite the opposite. He bought him a high-powered calculator to help with his math, and he encouraged Chandra to present his findings at the meeting.

So the fact got Chandra extra time as well for his lecture. And so Chandra felt that he was on his way. — But he soon learned that Eddington was scheduled to speak immediately after him, like instead of the Q&A session. — And he wondered why Eddington didn't tell him about it, but he figured there was nothing to do about it. At the meeting on January 11, 1935, Chandra took his seat in the back of the lecture hall.

As a graduate student, I've been in that very room. I've given a talk myself from that lectern. You know, it has the kind, you know, the kinds of rooms where you enter and you feel a sense of history and privilege. Like you've entered the room, like the inner sanctum. Sitting in the inner sanctum with his heroes in 1935, 24-year-old Chandra prepared to present his theory. He watched as speaker after speaker

floated idea balloons as everyone in the room hurled darts at them. The room was hotter than usual. Steaming by the time Chandra got up to give his paper, it was two hours into the session, and he literally had to sidle down a side of the room, stroll up to the symposium, arrange his papers, and presented his lecture on the fate of stars. Chandra explained that if a star has more than 1.4 times the mass of our sun, it will keep collapsing, beyond what Fowler had suggested, down to what he called the Chandra Sekhar mass.

And he sort of showed this graph of the fate of a star above a certain mass, leaving behind this very peculiar and bizarre corpse, right, this black hole. Chandra finished his talk. Gathered up his papers. He congratulated himself on his performance and then returned to the back of the room. An uncomfortable rustling in the audience. A few coughs. Now it was Eddington's turn to talk.

The crowd waited to hear what the 53-year-old veteran thought of this rookie's theory. Ever theatrical, Eddington waited a measured fraction of a minute, then rose majestically from his chair and in one step mounted to the podium and addressed the audience with an arrogant flourish. I do not know whether I shall escape from this meeting alive. But the point of my paper is that there is no such thing.

And let's just say Eddington did not endorse Chandra's theory. Instead he kinda And let's just say, Eddington did not endorse Chandra's theory. Instead, he kind of ripped into the idea. And he declared it a mathematical slate of hand and that it had nothing to do with reality. He also said it was incorrect that he had made a mistake, which means you didn't understand something, right? Which two intellectuals is like the deepest knife gash you can get, right? It's like, you know. Eddington said the laws of physics would never allow a star to collapse infinitely

and form a singularity. Any could denounce Chandra's theory as stellar buffoonery. Stellar buffoonery? Yeah, just nonsense. The words hit Chandra in the back of the room like a shockwave. He leapt up out of his seat, but the chairman... A powerful astrophysicist demanded that Chandra sit down and he went on to the next speaker. What? He wasn't even allowed to defend himself?

No. Oh my gosh. To add insult to injury, nobody spoke up on Chandra's behalf. Even scientists who knew Eddington was wrong. It's about power, right? So nobody spoke up. They don't dare oppose Eddington in such a public forum. I can imagine that it was a moment of intense betrayal. Chandra never forgot the humiliation of that day, the betrayal that hung in the room as

his colleagues sat silently. In December of 1935, 12 months after the event, he wrote to his brother that the confrontation with Eddington had poisoned him. He became discouraged about studying the fate of stars. He felt a bitterness toward Eddington. But at least publicly, the two men stayed chummy. What's interesting is that the two men went bicycling together and Eddington took Shadra to Wimbledon, but they never discussed the fate of stars. A little more than a year after that meeting at the Royal Astronomical Society, Chandra left Cambridge and took a position at the Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin. But before he put aside studying the ultimate fate of stars,

he wrote a book called An Introduction to Stellar Structure. It included his theory on the Chandrasekhar Mass. And when Eddington saw it, he said, Isn't it nice to have all the wrong results in one place? Oh my gosh. Eddington died in 1944, before the two men could ever reconcile, and exactly two decades before a world-changing discovery. In 1964, a small rocket lifted off from New Mexico carrying two Geiger counters, machines

that measure radiation. And these Geiger counters found... ...that there were intense and variable X-ray bursts from the vicinity of Cygnus X-1. Cygnus X-1 is part of a binary star system in the Milky Way galaxy. Through these X-ray measurements, it was calculated that this dying star had more than 21 times the mass of our sun. But the outer boundary of the dying star,

known as the event horizon, was only 55 miles wide. That's 21 suns packed into an area not much bigger than Los Angeles. That is extremely dense, and it was way too much mass to be a white dwarf. It had to be something else. And so by indirect deduction, Cygnus X-1 has all the characteristics of a black hole. The first black hole had been discovered. Princeton physicist John Wheeler is credited with coining the term black hole. After the discovery of Cygnus X-1, he wrote, these black holes teach us, quote, that space can be crumpled like a piece of paper

into an infinitesimal dot, that time can be extinguished like a blown out flame, and that the laws of physics that we regard as sacred, as immutable, are anything but. Chandra had been right all along, and now the world knew it. And in 1983, something happened that I'm sure he would have loved Eddington to be alive to see. It is my privilege and pleasure to convey to you the warmest congratulations of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. May I now ask you to come forward and receive your prize from the hands of His Majesty the King.

More than 50 years after standing on the deck of that ship and coming up with the Chandra Mass theory, Chandra was awarded the Nobel Prize. After all those years, he was vindicated. And Chandra says Eddington may have actually done him a favor. In an Indian television special broadcast in 2014 on NDTV, he warned that for a scientist, instant recognition can be a curse, a distraction. and prestige, then it can, in the long run, harm you, because you lose your motivation to continue doing science. And Priya says prizes are nice and all, but…

The fact that this idea has stood the test of time, I think that is, for me, that's the true, true sweet aspect of it. Time has ultimately proven Chandra right. That doesn't make up for the betrayal and bitterness he endured. But Priya says this, unfortunately, is the dark side of ambition. It's very human that the other side of it, right, it's accompanied by rivalries and jealousies and competitiveness. Because it doesn't matter how hard any of us try, we are still human.

I think we get invested as scientists, very deeply emotionally invested in our ideas. And it is emotional. I mean, so this is not cold objective calculation. It is emotional, right? So Brahmanian Chandrasekhar died in 1995. Shortly after his death, NASA held an essay writing competition to name its new X-ray space telescope,

the one that would make it possible to actually see a black hole. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory would be operating the new scope, so it helped judge the entries. Essays poured in by the thousands, but one name kept coming up. So NASA named its new space telescope the Chandra X-ray Observatory. Coming up on the next episode of Side Door, the name Chandra once again revolutionizes astrophysics, but this time as a space telescope that makes it possible for us to watch space,

like David Attenborough watches lions on the savanna. Chandra, for example, has witnessed like little snacks being eaten by our own supermassive block hole Sagittarius A star. What kind of snacks? Little asteroids, little like after school snack kind of thing, a little asteroid wandering too close. It results in like these small flares. And I always thought that was so cool.

But then you can also see, of course, like larger more massive stars can be eaten, and that's to me more like a larger Sunday dinner. We'll have that story on the next episode of Side Door. You've been listening to Side Door, a podcast from the Smithsonian with support from PRX. To learn more about Sabraminyan Chandrasekhar and the Chandra X-ray Observatory, check out our newsletter. You can subscribe at si.edu slash side door.

And you can join the Smithsonian this summer for a cosmic journey. We'll travel from our closest star, the Sun, to the far reaches of the universe, with events and virtual resources from across the Smithsonian. Visit our website, si.edu slash Cosmic Journey for the full event schedule. You can also follow along on social media. Our handle is easy. It's at Smithsonian. For help with this episode, we want to thank Kim Arkand, Arthur Miller, and Priyamvada Natarajan. Arthur's book about the feud between Subramanyan Chandrasekhar and Sir Arthur Eddington

is called Empire of the Stars, Friendship, Obsession, and Betrayal in the Quest for Black Holes. It's a fun read and it really breaks down the astrophysics to make it understandable. Our podcast is produced by James Morrison and me, Lizzie Peabody. Our associate producer is Natalie Boyd. Executive producer is Ann Kinanen.

Our editorial team is Jess Sadek and Sharon Bryant. Tammy O'Neill writes our newsletter. Russell Gregg transcribes our episodes. Episode artwork is by Dave Leonard. Extra support comes from PRX. Our show is mixed by Tarek Fuda. Our theme song and episode music are by Breakmaster Cylinder. If you have a pitch for us, send us an email at sidedorr.si.edu. And if you want to sponsor our show, please email sponsorship at prx.org. I'm your host, Lizzie Peabody.

Thanks for listening. I met Chandra once. at prx.org. I'm your host, Lizzie Peabody. Thanks for listening. I met Chandra once. You did? Yeah, at a MacArthur Foundation meeting in Chicago. Wow. I went up to her and introduced myself and we talked about astrophysics and this and that. And then I made the mistake of bringing up the Eddington episode. I said, do you have

any thoughts you might have on the episode? He looked at me and shook my hand and walked away.