Episode Details

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar calculated the Chandrasekhar Limit — the mass above which a star must collapse into a white dwarf or beyond — while sailing from India to England at age nineteen. When he presented his work at the Royal Astronomical Society, Arthur Eddington, the most powerful astronomer in Britain, publicly ridiculed him. Chandrasekhar spent the next fifty years being proven right, and finally received the Nobel Prize in 1983 for work he had done as a teenager on a boat.

This episode traces Chandrasekhar from his Tamil Brahmin childhood through the shipboard calculation, the Eddington humiliation, the decades of vindication, and the Nobel Prize that came half a century after the discovery.

• The shipboard calculation at nineteen that predicted the fate of massive stars
• Eddington's public ridicule and the damage it did to Chandrasekhar's early career
• The move to Chicago and the decades of quiet, systematic work across multiple fields
• The 1983 Nobel Prize and the vindication of an idea first conceived on a boat at nineteen