this page honors Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (1910-1995)
For images of white dwarf stars, see NASA's Advanced X-ray Astronomy Facility "Chandra" site. The AXAF was renamed to honor Chandrasekhar.
"We can readily concede that Newton's laws of gravitation require to be modified to allow for the finiteness of the velocity of light and to disallow instantaneous action at a distance. With this concession, it follows that the deviations of the planetary orbits from the Newtonian predictions must be quadratic .. [and] these deviations, even in the most favorable cases, can amount to no more than a few parts in a million. Accordingly, it would have been entirely sufficient if Einstein had sought a theory that would allow for such small deviations from the predictions of the Newtonian theory by a perturbative treatment. That would have been the normal way. But that was not Einstein's way: he sought, instead, for an exact theory. And he arrived at his field equations by qualitative arguments of a physical nature combined with an unerring sense for mathematical elegance and simplicity."
— S. Chandrasekhar, Truth and Beauty: Aesthetics and Motivations in Science.
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