Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar was an astrophysicist who calculated the maximum size of a white dwarf, which is known as the Chandrasekhar Limit. On his initial presentation of the theory to his mentor, Sir Arthur Eddington, a man already famed in astrophysics, he was rejected, and in fact Eddington never did accept the proof. Gino Segrè quotes Chandrasekhar in A Matter of Degrees, p. 268 (typos mine) on the incident:
“The moral is that a certain modesty toward science always pays in the end. These people (Eddington …) terribly clever, of great intellectual ability, terribly perceptive in many ways, lost out because they did not have the modesty to say ‘I am going to learn what physics teaches me.’ They wanted to dictate how physics should be.“
I can’t help but note that this is, incidentally, a blistering indictment of the current GOP. Not only in climate change, but in economics as well, as demonstrated in the Kansas debacle, wherein Kansas, after applying the GOP’s model of how the economy works, has suffered an economic decline not in keeping with its neighbors. The man responsible, Governor Brownback, wants to apply his model to the entire nation.
All I can think is that Brownback would bring the nation down in order to improve Kansas’ performance, relatively speaking.
Anyways, seeing politics even in Chandrasekhar’s observation of scientists’ intellectual errors makes me wonder if I’m taking the political world far too seriously.
