New York Diary

this is what happens when you don't democratize science

Today's Tuesday Morning Quarterback, the best football roundup on the web (or in the papers, or on TV), explains that the Chandrasekhar limit isn't actually a limit. Gregg Easterbrook (who writes TMQ) elaborates better than I could, and I urge you to read at least that bit of this week's column, because the implications are dazzling.

But you're not going to go read it, are you? No. I know at least some of you are never going to make your way over to ESPN just to read about the latest research into type Ia supernovae. But you should.

That's it. I was going to give you the rundown myself, but Easterbrook is so readable, and this is so cool, that I really mean it when I say you ought to go over there and read it yourself. I will give you the implications, though:

1. Cosmic expansion is not accelerating
2. There's no such thing as dark matter or energy (or at least, no reason why there should be, which amounts to very nearly the same thing)

Now. Today is Tuesday, day not only of ESPN.com's TMQ, but also of the New York Times's Science Times. Why is it that the latter is not telling me about Chandrasekhar? (I did a historical search. The latter never told me about this.)

And here's an interesting story that Easterbrook doesn't tell: Chandresakhar himself was an Indian Astrophysicist. He won the Nobel Prize for his work, basically hypothesizing the existence of black holes, neutron stars, and (as yet undiscovered) quark stars. But when he presented his work to the Royal Society in the 1930s, his old Cambridge advisor Sir Arthur Eddington attacked him with what Wolfram calls "nonsensical and contradictory arguments." It was a particularly vicious move: Eddington had been inquiring into Chandra's work for months and had never commented upon it. When Chandra was finally invited to lecture to the Royal Society, Eddington had the secretary schedule himself into the following timeslot, which he used to roundly denounce what Chandrasekhar had just said. Chandra was prevented from replying, and (because of how the very influential Eddington had closed the doors to the young man) he only really had an opportunity to publicly defend his conjecture four years after the whole episode. Chandra wrote home in anger (some choice words: "Prejudices! Prejudices!" and "Eddington is simply stuck up!"). Then he packed up and moved to America.

Oh, to read the relevant TMQ bit yourself: go to http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=easterbrook/061128, search for "Chandrasekhar," and read Easterbrook's brief, clear explanation of the whole thing. (You could also read it in Nature, but that version is rather less comprehensible to the intelligent Average Joe like me.)

posted by Skay @ 9:14 PM