The perfomance opens with Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (played by Nilanjan Choudhury) gazing at the stars. Credit: Shahid Jameel
“Our thoughts and actions cannot always be explained by reason...any more than you can extract the square root of a sonnet. For that’s what we poor humans are — the square roots of sonnets — impossible conundrums, unsolvable equations,” said the astronomer Arthur Stanley Eddington to his pupil, astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (Chandra).
Chandra’s reply encapsulates the central tension of the play The Square Root of a Sonnet: “And yet, Arthur — if you had chosen to solve the right equations, then things might have been so different today. You were my guru. I was your disciple. Together, we could have done for astrophysics what Galileo and Newton had done for classical mechanics … we could have created history instead of being reduced to its footnotes. But you solved the wrong equation. And I lost 40 years. Science lost 40 years.”
These lines set the tone for a performance at The Royal Institution in London on 19 and 20 July 2024. Written by Bengaluru-based artist and IT professional Nilanjan Choudhury, who also starred as Chandra, the play featured Sal Yusuf as Eddington, Swati De as Chandra’s wife Lalitha, and Shonali Chinniah as Eddington’s sister Winifred. Produced by the Centre for Film and Drama, India, and directed by Prakash Belawadi, the UK premiere was supported by the Murty Trust.
The narrative moves between the 1930s and the present day focusing on Chandra’s mathematical calculations on the fate of stars as they run out of thermonuclear fuel and become white dwarfs — extremely dense but with low luminosity. At age 19, Chandra formulated the Chandrasekhar Limit — the maximum mass of a stable white dwarf star, beyond which stars collapse into black holes. Despite this groundbreaking work, his theories were rubbished by his mentor, Eddington, setting the stage for a decades-long scientific controversy. Eddington’s towering status and his public rebuke of Chandra at the Royal Astronomical Society form the backdrop of the play.
With a minimalist stage setting and a cast of four characters, the play keeps the audience engrossed for over two and a half hours. The script explores themes of ambition, mentorship and racial boundaries. It satires the often hypocritical nature of the scientific community. Eddington’s explanation of Einstein’s gravity using simple props — an apple, a ping pong ball, and a tablecloth — makes complex scientific ideas accessible to a non-scientific audience.
Eddington’s character plays to an English audience, as he holds forth on the concept of gravity as a mere a consequence of geometry. Light travels not in straight lines but follows the curvature of space — the denser the object, the greater is the curvature of space-time around it. Light, declares Yusuf as Eddington, “does not move with the determination of the Englishman making a beeline for the nearest pub, but rather like the Englishwoman whose fancy might be caught by the latest display of silk gowns at Harrods”.
The play also highlights the biases of the scientific establishment. While Eddington openly criticised Chandra’s calculations, other prominent physicists of the time such as Niels Bohr, Ralph Fowler and Wolfgang Pauli, agreed with Chandra in private but refrained from public support. This hypocrisy is sharply questioned by Lalitha, who suggests racial undertones of their actions. Later, when Chandra’s work is used in the Manhattan Project, Lalitha asks, “So, the American government is willing to accept great Danes, Hungarians, Italians, Austrians, Alsatians and even German Shepherds for its top-secret project, but not Indians.”
It’s intriguing why Chandra opted for Chicago over returning to Bangalore from Cambridge, especially considering his paternal uncle was the illustrious physicist C V Raman. In a letter to Chandra, Raman dismissed astrophysics as a legitimate branch of physics, “I will never allow astrophysicists to step within one hundred kilometers of Bangalore.” The relationship between the two was clearly strained. “India has no use for me,” Chandra lamented.
Chandra’s ultimate vindication comes when he wins the 1983 Nobel Prize for Physics, 53 years after his discovery. Despite their differences, Chandra admires Eddington for providing the first experimental proof of Einstein’s theory, based on his measurements and calculations during the 1919 solar eclipse.
The Square Root of a Sonnet — The Strange History of Black Holes presents the struggles and triumphs of one of the most significant yet under appreciated figures in astrophysics. It is a reminder of the enduring power of scientific inquiry and irreverence.
