Popular Science Review - Empire of the Stars

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Review - Empire of the Stars - Arthur I. Miller

Sometimes, if you read a lot of popular science books, you begin to think that there aren't any big people stories left to tell in the history of science - then a book like this comes along and proves you wrong. Arthur Miller (no, not that Arthur Miller) tells the story of the Indian astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar - usually known as Chandra - and his battle with the greatest (though fading) astrophysicist of his day, Sir Arthur Eddington, hence the dramatic subtitle "friendship, obsession and betrayal in the quest for black holes."

Chandra came to Cambridge as a young man full of ideals, only to find that the political machinations that were rife in astrophysics at the time would chew him up and put his whole career at risk. Despite that, despite Eddington's head-on assault (because Chandra's theory of the mechanisms of white dwarf stars that prefigured the concept of a black hole put Eddington's attempt at a theory of everything at risk), Chandra won through to a stellar career. In fact, the Eddington incident was very early in his career - in 1935, sixty years before Chandra died - but it would influence his attitude from then on.

The book is the story of Chandra and of the development of the ideas that would lead to the realization that black holes probably exist (probably, because you can't exactly see a black hole, and just as this review was written, a new theory was published suggesting that black holes need not exist) - and it is a fascinating one. What's more, Chandra's development as a scientist, first studying stellar mechanisms, then general relativity is well plotted, as is the development of astrophysics during his lifetime.

There are a couple of moans. The smaller of the two is that Miller slants his text against Cambridge, describing it as something like "the drab grey fens", which is unfair and not even reflective of Chandra's own reaction to it. Though Chandra's reception there was fairly restrained, this only reflected the culture of the period, something that Miller seems to unfairly take out on the beautiful place itself. More significantly, he has succumbed to what can now be called Brysonitus - the unnecessary urge to make your popular science book big and fat at all costs. The content of this book would have worked much better in a volume of half to two thirds the length. Because of this there's a lot of repetition, and the battle with Eddington, which certainly was worth a chapter or two, goes on in effect for an unnecessary couple of hundred pages.

If it wasn't for this tedious urge to keep it long, the book could have got the five stars the subject deserves. Even so, it's a wonderful story with the ideal mix of human interest and leading edge science in a field that was emerging from guesswork into the true scientific arena, and so it's well worth reading, even though it could have been so much better.

Only in hardback.

Reviewed by Brian Clegg

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