Chandrasekhar, known simply as ”Chandra” to his colleagues and students alike, is one of the most revered men at the school. In 1930, at the age of 19, Chandra took an ocean liner from his native India to begin graduate school at Cambridge University in England. Just before he left India, he was given a book written by the world`s then pre-eminent astrophysicist, Sir Arthur Eddington, on what happens to stars when they burn themselves out.
Chandra read the book en route to England, enjoyed it, but thought he detected a flaw in Eddington`s theory. By the time he reached Cambridge, he had amended Eddington`s theory with some results that puzzled him, and he spent the next four years refining his calculations.
Eddington was a professor at Cambridge at the time, and though they became close and mutually admiring friends, he and Chandra could not agree on their varying theories on what happens to a star when it dies. Eddington believed all stars, once they burned themselves out, collapse into a body about the size of Earth and stabilize into a thing called a ”white dwarf star.”
Chandra, using the laws of physics to guide his calculations, concluded that only smaller stars approximately the size of the Earth`s sun would stabilize into white dwarf stars. He said that something else would happen to any star with 1.4 times the mass of the sun or larger. He theorized that the gravitational force in a collapsing larger star would cause the compressing electrons in the star`s gases to move faster and faster until they approached the speed of light–a state called ”relativistic degeneracy.”
Because of relativistic degeneracy, Chandra thought that a larger star would never stabilize but continue to compress, becoming smaller and smaller. He was puzzled by the eventual fate of the collapsing star, and in London in 1935, when he and Eddington publicly debated their opposing theories at a meeting of distinguished astrophysicists, he said, ”One is left speculating on other possibilities.”
Chandra`s reputation in England was ruined at that meeting when Eddington ridiculed the younger scientist`s theory. ”A reductio ad absurdum,” is how Eddington described it. ”I think there should be a law of nature to prevent a star from behaving in this absurd way.”
Eddington`s reputation was so great that other scientists at the meeting accepted his refutation of Chandra`s theory at face value. The humiliation was so great for Chandra that he knew he had no chance of finding academic work in England, so he left for America.
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He wasn`t in this country long before Robert Maynard Hutchins invited him to join the faculty at Chicago. Chandra, grateful for the chance at an academic post, accepted. He spent his first two years on the Midway committing his theory to a book, then turned to other scientific interests.
The book he published in 1939 sat virtually unnoticed for nearly two decades before other astrophysicists discovered its importance. Not only was Chandra right, but the large, dying stars that he speculated about became one of the great scientific discoveries of all time. They are now called Black Holes, the mysterious, imploding, invisible forces that suck in all heavenly matter surrounding them.
By the time Chandra`s theory was vindicated by other scientists, however, he had already distinguished himself with a number of other accomplishments in astrophysics.
Chandra`s method throughout his career at Chicago has been to devote 7 to 10 years doing a major, mathematical, theoretical study of some aspect of the universe. He works his equations by hand at his desk 12 hours a day, seven days a week, winter, spring, summer and fall. When he finishes, he writes a book on the subject, files away his equations and turns to something new.
Like the Black Hole theory, the books he writes are so far outside the scientific mainstream that they usually are ignored for several years. When other scientists catch up to where his own mind has been leading him, his work becomes the definitive text on the subject.
Among the subjects to which he has devoted long years of study have been the ”dynamical friction” between the stars that influences the speed at which they travel; transfers of radiation between layers of the stars;
physical laws that affect the behavior of fluid, ellipsoidal bodies (the shape of many galaxies); and a definitive study of the theory of relativity.
Little known to the general public because his work is so arcane, he has become one of the most celebrated figures in the world of theoretical science. His old nemesis, Sir Arthur Eddington, gave Chandra a testimonial many years after their public debate, suggesting that Chandra might be the greatest scientific mind since Isaac Newton.
The only things that can tear Chandra away from his research routine are discussions with other theoretical scientists about what they are researching and how they are going about it, and teaching his students.
Chandra was delighted when, in 1942, the federal government chose the University of Chicago as the site to gather scientists in an attempt to produce the first manmade nuclear reaction. It was a super-secret project, the first step in America`s war effort to produce an atomic bomb before Germany could build one. The experiment brought some of the best scientific minds in the world to Chicago, including physicists Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller and James Franck, and chemist Harold Urey. These men became friends of Chandra with whom he discussed ideas and sometimes collaborated on projects.
The experiment was a success, leading to production of the bombs used to shorten the war against Japan. After the war many of the scientists gathered in Chicago for the experiment decided they liked the university and chose to stay on, including Fermi, Franck and Urey. Their presence in Chicago began to attract top-flight younger scientists to the university, including physicists Murray Gell-Mann and Maria Goeppert-Mayer. They also attracted the cream of the nation`s graduate students in physics, who wanted to study under the distinguished faculty. Some of them became Chandra`s students.
Two who did were Tsung-dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang, doctoral candidates from China. In 1947, while Chandra was spending a year doing research at the university`s Yerkes Observatory in Lake Geneva, Wis., he had been scheduled to teach a graduate class consisting of only two students, Lee and Yang. Some of Chandra`s colleagues thought he was being unnecessarily devoted to teaching the course, because it forced him to drive 100 miles round trip to see his two students.
Nonetheless, Chandra thought the effort worthwhile because the students seemed like such promising scholars. He was right. In 1957 Lee and Yang won the Nobel prize for physics for their pioneering studies of the subatomic particles called K mesons.
In the early 1950s another young graduate student, James Cronin, enrolled at Chicago to get his doctorate in physics. Cronin, who was born in Hyde Park while his father studied for his doctorate in classical languages, had been brought up in Texas, where his parents had eventually settled. Graduating from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, he decided Chicago was the place to study physics, particularly since it was the only major school to offer him a graduate scholarship.
”It was marvelous studying here,” Cronin says. ”Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller, Murray Gell-Mann, Maria Goeppert-Mayer–I had all of those people as teachers.” In fact, the germ of the idea for the experiment that would lead to his Nobel Prize came from the classroom.
”The birth of it was in the spring of 1954, when I took a course taught by Murray Gell-Mann,” Cronin says. ”He wanted to update his students on the newest knowledge then being developed on atomic particles.”
Cronin was surprised to find himself sitting in Gell-Mann`s class with Enrico Fermi, winner of the Nobel physics prize in 1938. Among the things Gell-Mann talked about were the recent discoveries of K mesons and anti-K mesons, and work being done with them by scientists such as Lee and Yang.
”One day in class Fermi raised a question–a paradox, really–that Gell- Mann couldn`t answer,” Cronin says, ”and didn`t answer until he and Abraham Pais wrote a paper on it the following year. I didn`t see the cosmic importance of the exchange between Fermi and Gell-Mann at the time of the class, but the paper Gell-Mann published a year later led me to my own work.” Besides Cronin, Lee and Yang, Gell-Mann and Goeppert-Mayer eventually won Nobels themselves. And so did Chandra, 53 years after he devised his controversial theory as a 19-year-old on board a ship bound for England.
That so many intellectual giants have resided on the same campus is a hallmark of Chicago. Chandra from India, Fermi from Italy, Lee and Yang from China, Goeppert-Mayer and Franck from Germany, New York City native Gell-Mann, and Texas-reared Cronin were all at Chicago at roughly the same time.
They worked together, took classes from one another, exchanged ideas and information routinely, with the result that they heavily influenced one another`s work. Goeppert-Mayer, for instance, after winning her Nobel in 1963, said the breakthrough that led her to her prize-winning work came from a casual conversation with Fermi in a laboratory at the university one day in 1948.
Given that Cronin was attending one of Chandra`s courses the day Cronin won his Nobel, the tradition obviously still thrives.
”I think we go out of our way to emphasize the interdisciplinary approach,” Cronin says, ”and I think we do it far more than any other university that I know of. It`s important for scientists from different fields to keep themselves informed on what people are doing in fields other than their own. I know it enriches me by allowing me to be a part of a larger team, sharing a larger body of knowledge and outlook than my own narrow field would offer.
”It`s just exciting to see all that knowledge being created and discover the common links that connect it. My own field is becoming much closer to astrophysics, cosmo-chemistry, geophysics and even paleontology, which uses much the same tools as I do to explore the extinction of certain life forms, such as the dinosaurs. It`s exciting to be on a campus like this and find out when somebody has discovered new and important knowledge.”
At Chicago physicists work on a routine basis with medical researchers, and medical researchers work on a regular basis with professors of the social sciences. Members of the social science departments are also on the faculties of the professional schools, such as the law school, and professors of law are sometimes found teaching in the humanities.
A sort of academic mix-and-match process, the interdisciplinary approach at Chicago keeps the faculty in a constant state of intellectual ferment, finding new ways to extend the frontiers of knowledge. When Harper began to organize the university, that is what he had in mind. He was a great believer in research as the ultimate form of education. Men of discovery, he thought, made the greatest teachers of the young and untutored, so he insisted that the university he planned be first and foremost a research center.
”It is only a man who has made investigation who can teach others to investigate,” Harper wrote in 1891, a year before the university held its first class, setting up a criterion for hiring faculty that continues to this day.
”Promotion of younger men in the department will depend more largely upon the results of their work as investigators than upon the efficiency of their teaching, although the latter will by no means be overlooked. In other words it is proposed in this institution to make the work of investigation primary, the work of giving instruction secondary.”
Harper was something of an academic dynamo with startling visionary talents who dazzled American intellectual society in the latter half of the 19th Century. A child prodigy who entered college at the age of 10, he received his doctorate from Yale at the age of 18. He was a devout Baptist and a first-class scholar and teacher in his own right, a professor of Hebrew and cognate languages and the founder of two scholarly journals, The Hebrew Student and Hebraica.
He first came to Chicago in 1879 to teach at the Baptist Union Theological Seminary in Morgan Park. Boyish in appearance, small and rotund, he was an Easterner who was immediately taken with the possibilities of Chicago, then a boomtown rail and manufacturing center. But the small seminary was not big enough to contain his own bursting energies, described by the school`s dean as a ”super-abounding zeal.” Yale was constantly trying to lure him back to the East with promises of more money and a more important academic post.
In 1885, to keep him in the city, Harper was offered the presidency of the old Chicago University. A small Baptist-affiliated undergraduate college built in 1859 at Cottage Grove Avenue and 35th Street, the school was in dire financial straits. Harper turned down the offer, deciding to return to Yale as a full professor. There he held three academic posts and was becoming something of a national celebrity traveling the speakers` circuit as a popular Bible lecturer.
Harper did not forget Chicago, however, nor did the city forget him. Chicago University went bankrupt and closed its doors in 1886, but the city`s Baptist clergy and wealthy Baptist businessmen were determined to start a new college on a sounder financial footing. They had an ally in New York in John D. Rockefeller, the self-made millionaire oil magnate. Rockefeller was a pious Baptist who, once he had amassed one of the greatest personal fortunes in the world, became one of the great philanthropists of his time.
Chicago`s Baptists in the 1880s began planting the seed of the idea in Rockefeller`s mind that as the gateway to the fast-developing Western states, Chicago and the Middle West needed an outstanding Baptist college. The man they had in mind to head the new school was William Rainey Harper. Rockefeller knew about Harper because Yale had asked the millionaire for several thousand dollars in 1885 to lure Harper out of Chicago back to New Haven. In 1889 the Chicago Baptists were promising to recapture Harper, hoping that Rockefeller would pledge an initial $1 million to get a new school started in their city. Harper, however, was not interested in starting yet another Baptist college. He wanted to start a true university, patterned after the German university system of the 1800s, which allowed scholars the time they needed away from their classrooms to do their own research.
As much as the German universities, which had the highest standards of scholarship in the world at the time, Harper admired the great, ancient Gothic campuses of England, particularly Oxford and Cambridge. He had in mind a university that combined the German scholarly discipline within the steepled, cloistered enclaves of a British campus. He had in mind a school that would immediately join the ranks of the world`s elite research institutions.
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Harper`s concept of combining a graduate research school with an undergraduate college was severely criticized by eminent scholars of the day as a ”mongrel institution.” The place would be ”neither fish, flesh nor fowl,” said one critic, pooh-poohing the pretensions of a city like Chicago in the uneducated Middle West for thinking it was a suitable place for a major university.
Rockefeller was not particularly impressed with Harper`s dream, either. Though they were still colleges that had not yet grown into true universities, a number of old, outstanding East Coast schools, including Harvard, Yale and Princeton, were already serving the nation`s intellectual and social elite. Rockefeller thought that was quite enough.
Two new schools that aspired to be true universities, Johns Hopkins in Maryland and Clark in Massachusetts, were patterned after the German research institutes Harper so admired. But they were troubled schools lacking financial resources and the ability to keep first-rate scientists on their faculties. Rockefeller wanted no part of investing in yet another failing school in Chicago.
Harper was a persuasive man, however, and he gradually won Rockefeller and a number of Chicago philanthropists to his view.
Rockefeller, when he was first approached about underwriting a new Chicago college, thought he was in for a $600,000 contribution. Before construction for the first building on the new campus began in 1891, he had given $2 million. Before he died in 1937, Rockefeller had ended up giving Harper`s university $35 million.
Despite the generosity of the oil magnate and dozens of other wealthy philanthropists like him, the new school strove so ambitiously to attain instant greatness that it was constantly on the verge of bankruptcy in its first 20 years. Among his many other skills, Harper was relentless at badgering the wealthy for more money for his school, and Rockefeller was his favorite target.
Lawrence Kimpton, president of the university from 1951 to 1960, said it was once suggested that the university`s motto should be changed to ”Praise John from whom oil blessings flow.” One of Kimpton`s favorite stories for after-dinner audiences was the following:
”After Rockefeller had underwritten these deficits for some years, he finally called a halt and said that he would make a final gift to the university and that from here on out the university was on its own. Of course, while he was willing to talk to Mr. Harper in the future, he would not talk to him about deficits. Mr. Harper, of course, agreed.
”At the end of the fiscal year Harper went to New York to see Mr. Rockefeller. He called him up, and Rockefeller said that he was glad to see him but that he would not talk about deficits. Harper agreed, and when he walked into Rockefeller`s office, he said, `Let us pray.` That, of course, was the custom of the day. So they knelt down and prayed, and Mr. Harper told God all about the deficits. However, as you can well imagine, Mr. Rockefeller patiently underwrote Mr. Harper again.”
The million-dollar gifts did not go unappreciated by the student body of the fledgling school. When the dour Rockefeller made his first visit to the campus in 1896 to celebrate its fourth anniversary, he was delighted when the students turned out in force and enthusiastically sang a song composed for the occasion:
”John D. Rockefeller, wonderful man is he, gives all his spare change to the U. of C.”
Harper not only knew how to raise money, he knew how to spend it. More important than buildings, he needed to assemble the best faculty he could find. It seemed almost ludicrous at the time that he could hire away tenured members of distinguished faculties at prestigious, long-established schools to come to his new and untried institution. He did it by doubling the salaries being offered by any other college or university in the country.
Harper combined the high salaries with alluring promises to create an intellectual atmosphere at his new school that would be more open to creative research than any other place in America. Chicago soon had a faculty that could boast the names of scholars who would shape much of American
intellectual life through the first half of the 20th Century. Social theorists George Herbert Mead and John Dewey. Sociologist Albion Small. Historian Hermann von Holst. Economist Thorstein Veblen. Novelist Robert Herrick. Physicist Albert Michelson. Chemist John U. Nef. Geologist Thomas C. Chamberlin. Political scientist Charles Merriam.
No fewer than eight college presidents quit their posts in 1892 to join the new faculty in Chicago.
More than the big salaries, Harper made good on his promise of creating a school that encouraged research above all else. Almost from the day that it opened its doors, the university was taken seriously both for the people working there and its serious approach to creating new knowledge.
”Chicago University has given birth to the fruit of its gestation,”
wrote William James, a Harvard philosopher and pioneering psychologist, in a letter to a friend in 1903. ”The result is wonderful–a real school and real thought. Important thought, too! Did you ever hear of such a city or such a university? Here (at Harvard) we have thought but no school. At Yale a school but no thought. Chicago has both.”
Though Harper died of cancer at the age of 50 in 1905, it was perhaps a fitting tribute to his vision that Albert Michelson, a physicist on the university`s faculty, in 1907 became the first American to win a Nobel Prize.