Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar > Quotes

“In some strange way, any new fact or insight that I may have found has not seemed to me as a “discovery” of mine, but rather something that had always been there and that I had chanced to pick up.”
― Subrahmanijan Chandrasekhar

“The pursuit of science has often been compared to the scaling of mountains, high and not so high. But who amongst us can hope, even in imagination, to scale the Everest and reach its summit when the sky is blue and the air is still, and in the stillness of the air survey the entire Himalayan range in the dazzling white of the snow stretching to infinity? None of us can hope for a comparable vision of nature and of the universe around us. But there is nothing mean or lowly in standing in the valley below and awaiting the sun to rise over Kinchinjunga.”
― Subrahmanijan Chandrasekhar, Truth and Beauty: Aesthetics and Motivations in Science

“I am not religious in any sense; in fact, I consider myself an atheist.”
― Subrahmanijan Chandrasekhar

“In my entire scientific life, extending over forty-five years, the most shattering experience has been the realization that an exact solution of Einstein's equations of general relativity, discovered by the New Zealand mathematician Roy Kerr, provides the absolute exact representation of untold numbers of massive black holes that populate the universe. This "shuddering before the beautiful," this incredible fact that a discovery motivated by a search after the beautiful in mathematics should find its exact replica in Nature, persuades me to say that beauty is that to which the human mind responds at its deepest and most profound level.”
― Subrahmanijan Chandrasekhar

“I should like to preface my remarks with a personal statement in order that my later remarks will not be misunderstood. I consider myself an atheist.”
― Subrahmanijan Chandrasekhar

“Posterity in time will give us all our true measure, and assign to each of us our due and humble places, and that in the end, it is the judgement of posterity that really matters. He really succeeds who perseveres according to his likes unaffected by fortune, good or bad. It is well to remember that there is in general no correlation between the judgement of posterity and the judgement of contemporaries.”
― Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

“Actually, under stellar conditions matter is generally so highly ionized that, as we shall see in greater detail in chapter vii, the uncertainty in the chemical composition s essentially due to the uncertainty in the abundance of the two lightest elements, namely, hydrogen and helium. The abundance of the lightest elements, has then to be considered as a fresh parameter in the discussion. We can thus summarize by saying that our fundamental problem is to seek a theoretical relation of the kind

F[L, M, R, abundance of hydrogen and helium] = 0.”
― Subrahmanijan Chandrasekhar, An Introduction to the Study of Stellar Structure