WHERE STELLAR COLLAPSE HALTS

CHANDRASEKHAR AND THE LOGIC OF LIMITS

von Boris Kriger

292 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

In 1930, a nineteen-year-old on a boat from Madras worked out that a dead star cannot weigh more than about one and four tenths of our Sun. The number was strange in a way that took decades to appreciate: it contained no star in it at all. Not the chemistry, not the temperature, not the history. Just a few constants of nature, arranged.Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar had found something rarer than a discovery. He had found a limit.This book uses his number as a key to a larger lock. What exactly is a limit in physics? Why do some of them announce themselves with a clean number and others arrive as a shrug? Why did the most distinguished astronomer in Britain stand up at a scientific meeting, tear the young man's paper in half, and declare that there ought to be a law of nature forbidding stars from behaving so absurdly - and why, in a manner he would have hated, was he half right?From the pressure of crowded electrons to the collapse of massive stars, from Arthur Eddington's stagecraft to the theorems that quietly closed the ladder of stellar rungs, the story leads to an argument about what happens at the bottom of a collapse - and to the author's own proposal that gravity's runaway does not end in an infinity but in a floor, a ceiling on density rather than on mass, with a posit at its heart that is honestly labeled as a posit and a test that the next nearby supernova will perform whether or not anyone is ready.A book about the places where nature stops, and about the difference between a genuine limit and an excuse dressed as one.Keywords: Chandrasekhar limit, white dwarfs, stellar collapse, black holes, astrophysics history, Arthur Eddington, limits in physics

• Reihe: Independently published
• ISBN: 9798174658776
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 15.09.2026
• Größe: 229 x 152 mm
• Verlag: Independently published