In the twilight of his career, the distinguished astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar spends many a day leafing through volumes of poetry.
Yet his is hardly a case of intellectual hardening of the arteries. At 80, Chandra-as friends and co-workers know him-still arrives at his office on the University of Chicago`s campus every morning at 8:30. There he takes up an old-fashioned fountain pen and for several hours writes page after page of research notes in his precise Palmer Method handwriting. Colleagues and students know better than to even dream of knocking on his door before noon.
These days, though, Chandra`s manuscripts have fewer of the long strings of mathematical equations, like those for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1983. His recent scholarly papers carry titles like ”The Perception of Beauty and the Pursuit of Science” and ”On Apollonius, Kepler and Einstein, Newton and Shakespeare, and Madonna and Mrs. Pelham.”
”To me, it seems obvious that the human mind is indivisible,” Chandra said of his current preoccupation: exploring the common ground between artistic creation and scientific discovery.
It might seem, Chandra explains, that light-years separate the self-discipline of the laboratory scientist from the emotion of the artist, musician and painter. But the more he studies the careers of each, the more he is convinced that it is essentially the same creative instinct that inspires one man to put paint on canvas and another to peer through a microscope.
Yet despite his fascination with the subject, Chandra is a bit shy about sharing his current interest with other scientists, even though colleagues have long deferred to him as the pre-eminent astrophysicist of this generation. His pioneering studies of the death of stars led to the discovery of black holes-those enormous concentrations of energy mysteriously dotting outer space-and thus to modern science`s basic picture of the physical universe. Still, even some of Chandra`s greatest admirers were baffled by his latest book, ”Truth and Beauty: Aesthetics and Motivations in Science.”
”Most scientists are not comfortable talking about such matters,”
Chandra explained. ”Listen, I`ll tell you a little story.”
A conversation with Chandra alternates between scientific concepts of mind-bending abstraction with human-scale verbal portraits of colleagues, past and present. Because of the sheer length of his career, Chandra`s reminiscences are a virtual oral history of 20th Century physics, punctuated with appearances by notables such as Werner Heisenberg, who formulated quantum mechanics, and Niels Bohr, who conceived the model of the atom`s structure.
”One day at the lunch table,” Chandra said, ”El Greco`s name happened to be mentioned and my colleague Enrico Fermi didn`t even know who he was, nor was he a bit ashamed to say so.”
Consider that, Chandra continued: Fermi was a great physicist and the man who, on this very same campus, first split the atom. Yet he hadn`t a schoolboy`s knowledge of art, and didn`t even dream there might be a connection between his work and that of the Late Renaissance painter.
Decades ago, Chandra continued, the British scientist and novelist C. P. Snow was already decrying what he called the ”Two Cultures” problem:
Leonardo Da Vinci was a master painter, inventor and scientist. Now scientists and artists live in different intellectual worlds, taking little notice of each other.
”I`m not sure Snow`s thesis truly applies to literary artists, many of whom still feel a need to reach out and take in wide areas of knowledge,”
Chandra said. ”But it is true that modern scientists are often, like Fermi, so engrossed in research they`re scarcely aware of other fields. Most pursue their work without ever considering the question of their own motivation.”
Discovery at sea
Except for the accidents of his own career, Chandra noted, he, too, might have gone about his scientific work in an unreflective way. His first attraction to science was straightforward enough: As a child in his native India, he discovered that he had a talent for mathematics, the language of the physical sciences. An uncle of his was a distinguished physicist. So it seemed only natural for Chandra to follow his lead and enter that field, too, especially since in that era before World War II, when Britian ruled India, careers open to Indians were strictly limited.
”As a young man,” Chandra recalled, ”I thought of science quite simply as a place where I could make a name for myself.”
Indeed, he quickly did so locally, and as an undergraduate he was already presenting papers at scientific congresses in India. Upon graduating, he was awarded a traveling scholarship so he could continue his studies in England.
He was 20, and felt out of place amid the revelry and carousing with which fellow passengers distracted themselves during the long ocean voyage. So he took out his textbooks and directed his attention to a question then being debated by astronomers and physicists: What happens to a star, once it has burned up its store of energy?
Most scientists held that, with its fuel gone, an older star cools and contracts into a smaller and smaller sphere, until reaching a point of equilibrium and becoming what astronomers call a ”white dwarf.” The young Chandra mentally took that process down to the subatomic level, asking himself what would happen when a dying star`s electrons become so compressed that they begin to move with virtually the speed of light.
To his surprise, Chandra`s calculations showed that for a large star
(roughly, a star 1.4 times larger than the sun), the gravitational force would become so great that it could never reach a state of equilibrium. Instead, such a star would continue to contract right through the white-dwarf stage, getting ever smaller and ever denser. What that condition would be like, Chandra could only speculate.
Since then, scientists have come to conceptualize such a star`s death as a concentration of gravity so intense that nothing can escape it, even light- hence the term ”black hole.” Chandra`s calculation of the size beyond which a star is destined to become a black hole rather than a white dwarf has long since been inscribed in astronomy texts as the Chandrasekhar Limit.
Explosions of insight
That kind of scientific immortality was still very much in his future when Chandra arrived in England in 1930 and enrolled at Cambridge University. But he proudly showed his shipboard calculations to Sir Arthur Eddington, the most celebrated astronomer of the day. Initially, Eddington seemed impressed with Chandra`s work. But when Chandra presented his theory at a scientific conference, Eddington ridiculed it.
”I think there should be a law of nature to prevent a star from behaving in this absurd way,” Eddington told the audience.
His ill-fated debut, Chandra continued, left him virtually crippled, psychologically and professionally. As Eddington was the kingpin of the English scientific community, Chandra found it impossible to get a university post there. So he emigrated to America, eventually coming to the University of Chicago.
”The episode also forced me to carefully consider my reasons for wanting to continue to do astrophysics in the face of such a painful experience,”
Chandra said.
From that self-investigation, Chandra noted, he began an informal pursuit of the process by which scientists make their discoveries and comparing that with artistic creation. Chandra pursues that issue not so much in hope of finding practical applications but as a pure intellectual challenge. At the same time, he continued to tackle major issues in astrophysics at the U. of C., including the dynamics of stellar systems, the diffusion of energy within stars and special topics within the General Theory of Relativity.
Already at Cambridge, he had begun to read the modern novelists. Among his enduring favorites are the great Russian authors and the English writers Thomas Hardy and Virginia Woolf.
”Reading her, I can almost feel fine lace curtains in a gentle breeze,” Chandra said. ”Her prose has such a transparent quality, like an elegant mathematical formula.”
Chandra noted that we commonly picture the scientist as a methodical investigator, moving cautiously from one step in his logic to the next. But looking back upon their discoveries, many scientists themselves recall bursts of creative, almost irrational insight, similar to a poet`s or painter`s.
Einstein noted how the basic proposition of relativity came to him, seeming ”out of the blue,” Chandra noted. Heisenberg (author of the famous Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle: roughly, that the act of measuring a physical phenomenon alters it) similarly recalled the moment when he first grasped the laws of quantum mechanics and for both men the moment of discovery had a mystical, almost religious quality.
”You must have felt this too,” Heisenberg once said to Einstein, ”the almost frightening simplicity and wholeness of the relationships which nature suddenly spreads out before us and for which none of us was in the least prepared.”
The greatest scientists, Chandra continued, often characterize their work as a pilgrimage in search of Beauty, just as an artist might. Like the painter or architect, so also the physicist seems to have an instinctive attraction to proportion and a feeling for elegance. Yet in one important respect, scientific genius seems to follow a different pattern from artistic creativity.
”Poets and musicians seem to attain new creative levels as they mature,” Chandra said. ”But most scientists are like Newton and Einstein, who essentially accomplished their life`s work while still quite young.”
Einstein, he noted, was the greatest scientist of the 20th Century, and a man whose creative powers were of such a magnitude that Chandra, for one, can scarcely imagine anyone else making his breakthroughs. Yet after the publication of the General Theory of Relativity, Einstein never again made a significant contribution to physics. During the remaining 40 years of his life, Einstein was preoccupied with a vain search for a new and more encompassing physical theory.
A biographer has left us a telling description of Einstein in his latter years, Chandra noted. It depicts the great man sitting day after day, not doing any real physics, but simply shuffling one mathematical formula after another, hoping to find the one that would prove to be that grand field theory he was so desperate to find.
Beethoven`s peaceful finale
By contrast, creative artists often attain a kind of mature comfort that allows them to go on creating art and appreciating their colleagues`
contributions until the very end of their lives. In recent years, Chandra noted, he himself has reread the corpus of Shakespeare`s works. Shakespeare`s final plays provide clear evidence that the Bard died with his creative powers intact, Chandra contends.
”We know that, on his death bed, Beethoven spent his last days studying the corpus of Handel`s music,” Chandra said. ”One of the questions I keep asking myself is, Why shouldn`t scientists display that sense of serenity at the end of their lives that poets do? Can you imagine that Beethoven or Shakespeare were unhappy at the end of their lives?”
That so many scientists come to a different end, psychologically speaking, Chandra continued, points to a fundamental fact about the nature of scientific creativity. At the moment of discovery, the scientist is struck with a transcendental sense of his personal insight into the workings of nature. He feels, Chandra recalls a colleague once saying, ”as if a wall separating him from truth has suddenly collapsed.”
”Once having felt that,” Chandra said, ”the scientist subconsciously begins to consider himself not so much a student of nature as nature`s master. It seems to him that nature owes him her secrets.”
That feeling, Chandra continued, is both the scientist`s most powerful tool and his great liability. At its best, the scientist`s intuition runs parallel to the artist`s feeling for beauty and order. He feels himself seeing right through the complexities and contradictions of our everyday perceptions and grasping the ultimate simplicity by which the physical universe operates. At worst, it leads to the stagnation of old age.
Chandra himself spoke of the positive side of that feeling in the conclusion of the address he delivered upon being presented with the Nobel Prize:
”The simple is the seal of the true. And beauty is the splendor of truth.”
A visitor noted that theologians speak of religious insight in similar terms. For the believer, that sense of the universe`s ultimate simplicity and order implies the existence of the God who created it. Has Chandra`s research brought him to a similar conclusion? his visitor wanted to know.
”No, I was raised as a Hindu, but from my days at Cambridge I`ve considered myself a rationalist,” he said. He fell silent for a moment, then returned to the last topic, perhaps feeling he had dismissed the question too easily.
”Maybe it`s my personal limitation,” Chandra said. ”Enrico Fermi was a great scientist, yet he didn`t know who El Greco was. So, also, I don`t know who God is.”
