Empire of the Stars
I spent some of yesterday evening listening to an excellent talk by UCL professor Arthur Miller about his latest book, Empire of the stars. It focuses on the often tortured relationship between Eddington, the Grand Old Man of British Astrophysics, and Chandrasekhar. They first clashed while Chandra was a graduate student, over his claim that there was a maximum mass which a white dwarf could obtain. Prof Miller argued that Chandra was predicting the existence of black holes and that the sheer strangeness of the idea that a star could collapse essentially to nothing helped Eddington defend his position. In books published in the 1970s, one could still read about black holes as theoretically allowed by relativity, although it was far from clear whether they would actually exist. The first real evidence came with the measurement of the mass of Cygnus X-1 in 1971 (the term black hole was coined in 1969), and they now appear in popular language more than almost any other concept, whether it’s black holes in the budget or as standard sci-fi staples.
I read the book in hardback a year or so ago, and it is excellent. So good, that I feel absolved from the need to summarize it here - you should all go and read it.
Prof. Miller also reminded me that one of the possibilities for the the Large Hadron Collider when it switches on later this year is the prediction of many, many small black holes, each the size of a proton. These black holes should evaporate extremely quickly, and would thus be detectable - providing a stringent test of certain versions of string theory…fingers crossed.
