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Empire of the stars : obsession, friendship, and betrayal in the quest for black holes

Title: Empire of the stars : obsession, friendship, and betrayal in the quest for black holes / Arthur I. Miller.
Author: Miller, Arthur I.
Publication: Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 2005.

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan How do I pick up this item and when will it be ready?	Text	Request in advance	QB35 .M55 2005	Off-site

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Details

Description

xx, 364 pages : illustrations; 24 cm

Summary

"August 1930, on a voyage from Madras to London, a young Indian looked up at the stars and contemplated their fate. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar - Chandra, as he was called - calculated that certain stars would suffer a strange and violent death, collapsing to virtually nothing. This extraordinary claim, the first mathematical description of black holes, brought Chandra into direct conflict with Sir Arthur Eddington, one of the greatest astrophysicists of the day. Eddington ridiculed the young man's idea at a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1935, sending Chandra into an intellectual and emotional tailspin - and hindering the progress of astrophysics for nearly forty years." "Empire of the Stars is the dramatic story of this intellectual debate and its implications for twentieth-century science. Arthur I. Miller traces the idea of black holes from early notions of "dark stars" to the modern concepts of wormholes, quantum foam, and baby universes. In the process, he follows the rise of two great theories - relativity and quantum mechanics - that meet head-on in black holes."--BOOK JACKET.

Subject

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

1. Fatal collision -- 2. A journey between two worlds -- 3. Rival giants of astrophysics -- 4. Stellar buffoonery -- 5. Into the crucibles of nature -- 6. Eddington's discontents -- 7. American adventure -- 8. An era ends -- 9. How stars shine -- 10. Supernovae in the heavens and on earth -- 11. How the unthinkable became thinkable -- 12. The jaws of darkness -- 13. Shuddering before the beautiful -- 14. Into a black hole -- App. A. The ongoing tale of Sirius B -- App. B. Updating the supernova story.

ISBN

061834151X

LCCN

2004060909

OCLC

57243361
ocm57243361
SCSB-5192391

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries