In the summer of 1930, a 19-year-old student sailing from India to England passed the weeks at sea doing math and arrived having shown that massive dying stars can collapse entirely. This episode explores the life of Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, born in Lahore in 1910 to a mother who translated Ibsen into Tamil and a family that included Nobel laureate C.V. Raman, who won the physics prize the same year Chandra boarded that ship.

The hosts break down the physics of degenerate electron gas pressure and how factoring in special relativity revealed a hard limit of about 1.44 solar masses, beyond which nothing stops gravitational collapse. They recount the 1935 Royal Astronomical Society meeting where Arthur Eddington publicly shredded the theory, how Chandra sought counsel from Niels Bohr and Leon Rosenfeld rather than fight in the press, his m ...