A number calculated on a ship

In 1930 Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar sails from India to Cambridge. On the water he combines Fowler’s quantum statistics with relativity and finds that a white dwarf cannot be arbitrarily massive. Above a limit, about 1.4 times the Sun, the electron degeneracy that holds the star up is not enough. The number is a ceiling, not a portrait.

Sirius B, already seen in 1862, sits under that ceiling. The ceiling is new.

On 11 January 1935 he presents the result to the Royal Astronomical Society. Arthur Eddington, who had opened a sky for him, stands and says there is no such law, that the argument is a reductio ad absurdum. The room hears a young man and a famous one. The physics does not take a vote. White dwarfs still have a mass limit. Stars above it must become something else. That something else is later.