• DOI:10.1007/BF02702303
• Corpus ID: 73579437

Making the transition from Newton to Einstein: Chandrasekhar’s work on the post-Newtonian approximation and radiation reaction

@article{Schutz1996MakingTT,
  title={Making the transition from Newton to Einstein: Chandrasekhar’s work on the post-Newtonian approximation and radiation reaction},
  author={Bernard F. Schutz},
  journal={Journal of Astrophysics and Astronomy},
  year={1996},
  volume={17},
  pages={183-197}
}

• B. Schutz
• Published 1 December 1996
• Physics
• Journal of Astrophysics and Astronomy

Chandra first became interested in general relativity in the early 1930s. He had already discovered that white dwarfs had a maximum mass, and Eddington had pointed out that this would imply that stars of a larger mass could collapse to black holes. Eddington thought this idea so abhorrent that he felt forced to dismiss Chandra’s work on white dwarfs; this story is described elsewhere in this volume. But Chandra drew the opposite conclusion. He realised that he would need to understand general relativity in order to follow the implications of his discovery to their natural conclusions (Chandrasekhar [unpublished autobiographical memoirs]). Nevertheless, he did not study relativity immediately. Discouraged by the evident hostility towards general relativity shown by many prominent physicists in the 1930s (in his private memoirs (Chandrasekhar [unpublished autobiographical memoirs]) he mentions Bohr in particular), and believing that general relativity had already proved to be a “graveyard of many theoretical astronomers”, he steered a different course. In the 1950s, when he again thought of the subject, he remarked that astronomers doing relativity “were prone to play for high stakes”, while his own “approach to science was more conservative”; this perception was later to be borne out by his work on the post-Newtonian approximation, and in particular in deriving the reaction effects of gravitational radiation, where his conservatism helped him avoid mistakes that had been made by others. He finally took up his interest in relativity in the 1960s, when he had such a strong scientific reputation that, as a friend said to him, “What can you lose?”. But once he started in relativity, he never left it. After the 1960s, Chandra worked almost exclusively on problems in general relativity. Even in the 1960s, his impatience to finish other research projects and get on with relativity is evident in his memoirs. He repeatedly refers to “distractions” that prevent him from working full-time on relativistic problems; among these distractions are, surprisingly, some