this page honors Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (1910-1995)


black hole sun

For images of black holes, see NASA's Advanced X-ray Astronomy Facility "Chandra" site. The AXAF was renamed to honor Chandrasekhar.

Chandrasekhar proposed adopting two criteria for beauty:
– "some strangeness in the proportion!" (Francis Bacon)
– "the proper conformity of the parts to one another and to the whole." (Heisenberg)

"… Hawking's theorem that the surface area of a black hole must always increase suggests the identification of the surface area with the thermodynamic entropy of the black hole; and this leads to an intimate connection between thermodynamics, geometry, and gravity.

"There is clearly no lack of strangeness in the proportion in all these!"

– S. Chandrasekhar, Truth and Beauty: Aesthetics and Motivations in Science.


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