The Chandra Angle !!

Randomly enough I turned a page of a book I purchased early last year. (see I am keeping track of new year mistakes, its already; 1/1/2014, wow, feels so good. Hey you called me last year, well last night)

The book goes by the name, Einstein For Everyone, by Robert L. Piccioni, a student, among others, of Richard Feynman.

I picked up this book and the book by Tae Moriyama on Kanji for some leisurely reading today, since I am off seeing my grand mother and the first time I could make this time is today, New Year’s Day, and she is too old now, 84.

But thought of reading the Einstein’s book, rather than the kanji, because kanji has been a sturdy enough pastime by now, it will revert any time. I came across by random coincidence thus the article on neutron stars and started reading a stanza, not the first one, but the 3rd or 4th or sequence. (see? I do not usually go for bride seeking, my eyes might come on the 3rd or 4th one, rather than the one)

This one stanza made me glue-struck, its talks about electrons, neutrinos etc. (I am “ready to be” a particle physicist any day of the year)

So I read, even the 3rd or 4th line and not the first one. It was good, so I read the stanza from the beginning, it was good, so I started reading from beginning. I thought it so good I shall write about it and tell my folks. Talking about writing, last new year’s resolution was, to study and take pictures, more and more, check my face-book posting. This years resolution I proclaimed today, but thought of within a week or so, write and study more. Last year’s resolution was successful, per me, I became a better and changed person. This year there is certain hope, I am going to be better and bigger in my own responsibilities. And last years readership on this journal, mdashf, was amazing, a 2nd year in succession, success. This year there will be more and more hard work and persistence, amidst unspeakable difficulties that I am dealing with. Lets therefore hope for best. Last year there was a 4 month hiatus due to teaching assignment, it suffered loss of readership (as you will see from linked data, when it will be uploaded sooner than not). But it maintained a constant vibe to my surprise, which made me inspired enough to continue, when I came back in October.

Here is the story.

Chandra was an Americanized Physicist, who was educated in British India. Contrary to his luminary uncle CV Raman, the only other Nobel in Physics so far for Indianic pride, Chandra became a citizen of the United States. Perhaps before Indian independence of 1947 it had settled into Indian emissaries to make offshore destinations a place of greater significance than is even agreed to today. Remember Chandra’s Physicist friend and an equal luminary in the world of international Physics, Bhabha Homi Jehangir, actually wanted to bring Chandra to India, for a professional anchoring, that was not affirmed by Chandra. They both were beautiful birds of the international science and one returned to nestle. This is akin to Indian fraternity wanting Einstein and Bohm(?) and Somerfeld(?) to settle their professional anchors in India, not affirmed by the luminaries. India has to do much more than just to have the best names in a field say YES. But Chandra’s was to be seen in that respect. Chandra was an immense international figure of his time, as are the western names. To be enamored by anyone’s nationalistic origin is but an unfair trick. What we need is better playground for science and so far we are attracting only coaches and not the players. eg Amartya Sen is no more a player.

As a last note on this angle, Homi Bhabha was the namesake of my house in my boarding school for 5 years that I spent in the JNV system, as a student, and later the house and school captain. A real matter of pride that I was given leadership responsibilities and also it was the only house bearing a scientist’s name. In school my science affinity had become quite stronger (as opposed to my other capabilities of literature or arts) eg 2 days ago in annual alumni meet someone just surprisingly to me, reminded me that I had taken a wireless device to school right after graduating, and asked one fella to go to another room and tried the mobile signal propagation and enjoyed and inspired. But there are tons of science stories from school. (mostly all hilarious and personal by any account, a reason why I don’t tell them)

In the 1930s Chandra had come up with a brilliant by any account unraveling of the mystery of the cosmos. The Chandrasekhar Limit. 1st of all, its has been known as a lower limit on Black hole formation from stars than an upper limit on white-dwarfs.

The fact that matter can-not tolerate gravitational compactification due to massive attraction of different parts of a massive object towards each other is a great thing to realize. What then happens is a monotonous arrangement of matter such as a neutron star. No more the regular gravitational object can exist but a very interesting another form of really compact mass, does. When the atom disintegrates under the weakest strength of any force, that gravity is, as opposed to the even stronger weak-nuclear force, such disintegration of the atom are not harmful in a nuclear radiative way. But its still a conundrum of the gravitational induced Quantum Mechanics. In other words hold on and just don’t as of yet say its Quantum Gravity. Just that the force in the macro-scope has traversed to the scale of the quantum of atoms. They may not still be fundamentally unifiable, we do not have enough clue to make a conclusive remark, even today, the new year day of 2014 that we started this article on. Gravity might just be a statistical fluctuation at a macro-scope scale of reality induced by the quantum of various other fundamental forces at the micro and nano-scale (and femto and atto as well).

So atom disintegrates the chemical way (actually electromagnetically, in physics terms) , responsible for your desires, intentions, abilities and glamor and sense of fashion and clothing etc. atom disintegrates in a nuclear way, by two types of agents of change, strong and weak, and useful in someway eg electric power from nuclear reactors, diagnosis of cancer, knowing ages of artifacts and structures and processes. Its also fairly destructive and catastrophically damaging in many others: atomic explosions a la Hiroshima, atomic disintegration induced catastrophe a la fukushima (why the disasters always occur in Japan or is it shima, Japanese for islands, Japan is a daishima, a big island per se? NO why they always occur in the atom is what scientists have been asking) ..  [I was a frequent visitor to the Fukushima area, by my Nissan baby, an amazing place to hang out, between 2004- 2007, the tokai, J-Parc proton area and the oarai beach are the same place right? Sometimes I used to cut back through Mito, the capital of Ibaraki prefecture, Japan, where I lived over a time of 5 years. Mito was very beautiful, but by Fukushima, in 2011, I was in India and it saddened me. Japanese press calls this disaster 3-1-3? some such thing, will find out.]

So we now realize that an atom does disintegrate via all 4-ways of fundamental forces. (electromagnetic, nuclear-strong, nuclear-weak and gravity-weakest.) Amazing isn’t it? But for gravity being far far far weaker than other 3 forces to it to induce such disintegration means to have a correspondingly larger gravity-sourcing-object such as  a star.

A star is a stellar object, well is that a trivial language of expression? In any case what I meant to convey following that is, a star is one that shows all 4 ways of atomic disintegration, it being also a huge cosmological object. Chandra focused his views here. Just like Galileo on Jupiter with an optical tool called telescope. But science has progressed so much and church not so much but lets thank Britain’s queen for saying sorry to Alan Touring, whats up with these people, they always say sorry so late.

Chandra said therefore matter would disintegrate in certain ways than not. (see the difference? from an apocalypse cataclysm? not this way but here is what I figured out, this other way) And this disintegration comes about when the size of gravity-source or gravity force therefore, is humongous and it is in that nature that gravitational tolerance of ordinary matter has to be stopped somewhere. Beyond that, ordinary matter will collapse or disintegrate. Thus in retrospection white dwarfs have a limit of gravity force that they can tolerate. But since beyond that things would collapse far more it is also a minimum force required to create black-holes. That limit or sharp boundary between what collapses stars into black-holes and what does not more does and less does not, between more and less lies the definition that makes it known as more or less. (that is, what force of gravity can a white dwarf tolerate and what they will collapse under further, into black-holes) is called as Chandrasekhar Limit.

Less | More. “|” is the Chandrasekhar Limit. Less is what most objects such as earth or sun experiences, so we are stable, as far as gravitational apocalypse is addressed. | is the limit whose value is 1.4 x Msun, that is 1.4 times heavier than Sun’s mass is what causes objects to complain of their own cosmological weight. They go seeing a consultant: help me. Any thing above |, 1.4 x Msun or Chandrasekhar Limit is collapsing under its own weight. (One of my obese sister, cousin, collapsed under her weight and suffered a leg fracture, true story) So Black-holes are guys who collapsed under their own weight while their body also caught the fire from the wrong kind of atomic disintegration, the nuclear fusion type. So if a massive star is while suffering harmless collapse like that from gravity is also suffering a massive burnout and can either lit our house in poetic inspiration or can even suck us all up into its fold. That latter kind of depression is what I called on tweeter 2 yrs or more ago, “In their own mad compulsions super-stars become black-holes”. (also a veiled reference to a depressive mood of the day)

For tweeter celebrities if you have 1.4 million fans or more be aware you are sucking everyone to their cataclysm.

So when Chandra came with the new insight that under certain gravity than can anymore be tolerated things would collapse into nothing. (almost nothing, which will again collapse or disintegrate more and more) It was not agreed by such luminaries as Einstein and Eddington, the massive superstar of the time in the field of astronomy. Einstein whose theory was already a beauty for astronomers, and Eddington a master of glory in observation and experiment (?) didn’t like the idea of Chandra, it was too ugly. Now contrast this with Einstein’s empathizing with Bose for his statistical principle. Scientists can act out of subjectivity in matters of science, but its very short lived and without studied prejudice but a very healthy dose of skepticism. (not necessarily though, think Heisenberg’s and Schrodinger’s (?) rebuttal of each other, science is just pure fun)

Chandra was also judged as “unnatural” much the same way Alan Turing was and much the same way we judge the LGBT of today. But by 1937 Physicists realized Chandra was not only unnatural he was also right. He was by this time getting his due in academic career as  a position in UC, a place of quite reputation and prestige in Physics. This was all in a matter of half-a-decade. see how fast science mistakes are reverted. But still thank you Queen and thank you pope.

Chandra’s explanation of stars collapsing into neutron stars is this.

Ordinary matter constitutes from an atom that’s a happy union of electrons to an unnatural (or gay) couple called collectively nucleons: protons and neutrons. Problems start to show up when differences crop up. The neutron and proton married each other as they are equally obese. Neutron was slightly more so. This mass difference can be maintained when they experience gravity which is lesser than 1.4 Msun. But when that financial burden starts growing tension simmers. protons convert into neutrons by swallowing the electrons. (parents can eat kid to show that they are also heavier if being heavy is the matter of contention, there was a woman who ate her own baby and his kingly father wanted or attempted to have carnal slide when they all were fallen in a well, well as the story went in my sahitya book, 9th grade, the king inside the well impregnated the daughter and the daughter attempted to eat the flesh of the baby, in hunger, as far as I remember, never tell children pornographic stories, they remember that more than any thing else, when was Akbar born? well … ummm . ummm I forgot)

Once the proton became as heavy as the King, the neutron there still remains a problem. There is only neutrons and electrons now so to say. electrons inside the proton womb that now shows up as a neutron?

Ok in-between this process there are a tons of neutrinos that are ejaculated. The neutrinos are folks that know how to carry out an energy task without expending much on make-ups. So they are tiny little jerks that do not ever think of themselves. They simply take energy and vanish from the spot and give it to someone else. In the process since their mass is so very small, they do not unnecessarily spend any energy. A reason why they seem to be in quite a conflict with photons, as we saw 2 years ago, but the photons are just innocent when it comes to expending energy for mass. photons when they are considered singleton do not at all expend energy towards mass, they just do not have that attitude called mass.

But the neutron stars are still quite large. This is because the electrons are about 1000 times as longer in how much space they require to sit in that system, than the neutrons. the neutrons are heavy hard attitude guys, they will go no where. But the electrons while occupy such a large couch are far far less heavier than are neutron. So they are basically whats called “soft”. They are long-legged and eat less energy and when vanish the neutron stars have collapsed into an adjacent mass state but quite so very smaller in size, a 1000 times, smaller.

So two things happened that are called supernovae (that is super star phenomena).

1. (Type Ia supernovae) White dwarf > induced by atomic disintegration due to gravity pressure > Core of the star

2. (Core collapse supernovae) Core of the star > induced further by emission of electrons >  neutron star