Fleur's Place

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

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this page honors Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (1910-1995)

"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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