Immigration will feed innovation only when it is matched by policies that promote interaction. Common language will be critical to that.
On the late afternoon of Friday January 11th 1935, a brilliant, diminutive, 26 year old Indian physicist unveiled to the British scientific elite a radical theory that would revolutionise our understanding of how the universe works: the idea of the black hole.
That evening in 1935 Subramanyan Chandrasekhar dared to challenge the conventional wisdom that stars die by being reduced to a core of dead rock. He told the elite at the Royal Astronomical Society the gravitational forces unleashed when a star dies could be so great that it could consume itself and so it would disappear into a 'black hole'.
Chandra's mentor Sir Arthur Eddington (then the senior professor of astrophysics at Cambridge) had not discouraged him from pursuing the idea, yet when Eddington rose to respond he tore into the young Indian. Eddington ridiculed the idea of a black hole as "stellar buffoonery". Naively Chandra had imagined his fellow scientists would welcome his contribution for opening up new horizons for research. Yet unwittingly he had presented the establishment with a double whammy. To admit a black hole was possible would have entailed their rethinking many of the theories on which their careers had been built. To be forced to do so by a young Indian, at a time when the Raj still ruled India, would have been regarded as a humiliation. The old guard rallied around Eddington even though he presented little evidence to suggest Chandra was wrong.
The event cast a long shadow over Chandra's career. He was never offered a full-time position at Cambridge and eventually emigrated to the US where he spent most of the rest of his life at the University of Chicago. It took 40 years for astrophysicists to catch up with Chandra's theory and establish how black holes worked. Forty-five years after giving his initial lecture Chandra was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics.
Published
January 2008
Author
Charles Leadbeater
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