THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 27, 1995 TAG: 9508250023
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J4 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
SOURCE: KEITH MONROE
LENGTH: Medium: 72 lines
A recent obituary told an uplifting story that says a lot about America 60 years ago. It also raises questions about what America today is becoming.
The man who died on Aug. 21 in Chicago was Dr. Subramanyan Chandrasekhar. It's a name that may mean nothing to most of us, but to physicists he was a giant. He was born in India in 1911 and sailed to England in 1930 to do graduate work in astrophysics.
On the steamship taking him to Cambridge, Chandrasekhar read a paper by the era's most prominent astronomer. In it, Sir Arthur Eddington claimed that all dying stars shrink to become white dwarfs. Chandrasekhar was troubled by this conclusion and began on the voyage to work out the mathematics to demonstrate Eddington's error.
Three years later, the newly minted Ph.D. had a proof to propose that pointed to a far more interesting if less uniform universe, one containing not just white dwarfs but the then unnamed and unimagined neutron stars and black holes.
Chandrasekhar presented his paper refuting Eddington to a 1933 meeting of the British Royal Astronomical Society. Eddington rose when he'd finished to say there wasn't a word of truth to what the upstart said, and in a moment Chandrasekhar's career prospects were in shambles. Not a university in England would hire him.
Science is supposed to be an objective search for truth, but all too often it is as hidebound and conventional as any other old boy's club. Luckily, help was on the way. A physicist at the meeting told the admirable president of the University of Chicago, Robert Maynard Hutchins, about the young scholar's plight and Hutchins offered him a job.
Chandrasekhar was still on the faculty when he died this month - 60 years later. In those years, he had become a world-famous scholar and revered teacher. He once taught an advanced class to only two students. Both went on to win the Nobel Prize. His theory became the new conventional wisdom. The standard astronomical unit used to determine the ultimate fate of dying stars bears his name - the chandrasekhar limit.
And in 1984, the man England wouldn't employ brought home the Nobel Prize in physics to his adopted country of America. He won for some of the same work Eddington rejected 50 years earlier. Chandrasekhar said dryly, ``Usually my work has become appreciated only after some length of time.''
In retrospect, it's thrilling that Hutchins was willing to take a chance on a scholar bucking the trend. It was the depths of the depression, and teaching jobs were scarce. Yet America welcomed Chandrasekhar as it has welcomed so many millions of others - bold thinkers and crackpots, questioners and doubters, visionaries and innovators.
Would the same story play out in the same way today? Who knows. We live in an increasingly intolerant era. Presidential candidates denounce immigration and spread fear of foreigners. Pat Robertson takes to the airwaves to tell millions that Hinduism - the religion of Chandrasekhar's homeland - is a demonic faith. A Japanese student lost in America knocks on a door and is blown away.
Instead of becoming a society more open to new ideas and new blood, we are in danger of becoming a closed and narrow land. Our habitual optimism is being replaced with a pervasive pessismism. Many of our great institutions - including our universities - are in thrall to bureaucrats, friendly to convention and suspicious of coloring outside the lines. Too much of American life is controlled by vain and cautious men like Sir Arthur Eddington, anxious to preserve the status quo; too little is in the hands of adventurers like Hutchins, ready to take a chance.
It's probably still true that the Chandrasekhar of today is more likely to come to America to do his Nobel Prize-winning work than anywhere else. But we'd better make sure it stays that way. MEMO: Mr. Monroe writes editorials. by CNB