(This is Part 2 of a series on the life and work of Chandrasekhar. Read Part 1 first.)

It's January 11, 1935. A Friday. Burlington House, London. The Royal Astronomical Society is meeting, and Big Chandra has an invitation to speak, secured by none other than Sir Arthur Eddington, probably the most preeminent astronomer alive. Eddington had been curious about Chandra's work, had talked it over with him beforehand, and had encouraged him to bring his strange result, that white dwarfs might have a maximum mass, before the world.

Chandra gets up. He presents his argument. Flawless, impeccable, as always. Applause, a few questions, a curious and attentive audience. He sits down.

Then Eddington gets up. And Eddington spends his entire allotted time delivering a prepared talk that methodically tears down everything Chandra has just said. He rejects the math, the result, the conclusion, all of it. He argues there is simply no way a star could implode like that. "Various accidents may intervene to save the star," he says, "but I want more protection than that. I think there should be a law of Nature to prevent a star from behaving in this absurd way!"

He didn't stop that night, either. In a later talk at Harvard he called Chandra's mass limit "stellar buffoonery," and built a whole case around reductio ad absurdum: sure, the argument went, Chandra may be a wizard at mathematics and may understand relativity and quantum mechanics like almost no one else, but he isn't a real astronomer, and his conclusion, that stars can collapse, is so ridiculous on its face that we're entitled to throw the entire thing out on that basis alone. The only real work left, in Eddington's telling, was hunting down whatever technical detail would render the whole absurd business false. He accused Chandra of illegitimately marrying relativity to quantum theory, and declared he would not "regard the offspring of such a union as born in lawful wedlock."

To this day nobody quite knows why Eddington went after him so hard, or why he kept it up for years. Did he simply dislike Chandra? Was he galled that a kid had produced this dazzling piece of mathematical and physical insight? That an Indian kid had? Or was it the result itself, the sheer discomfort of stars that die and keep dying, that he couldn't stomach?

We do know one thing about the man: Eddington liked to stick to his guns, especially on white dwarfs. He had once insisted they were a perfect gas with no degenerate matter in them at all. When a rival, E.A. Milne, published a competing theory, Eddington wrote that it was "difficult to discuss this paper," because "it would be absurd to pretend that I think there is the remotest chance of his being right." That was the temperament Chandra was up against.

Here's the thing, though. Privately, everyone knew Eddington was wrong. Bohr knew it. Pauli knew it. Dirac, the Dirac of Fermi-Dirac statistics himself, the one human on Earth most qualified to judge whether someone had correctly wedded quantum theory to relativity, knew it. They told Chandra, quietly, that he was right and that Eddington's arguments, and more importantly his physics, were wrong.

But Eddington was famous and powerful, and famous and powerful specifically in astronomy, while nearly everyone who knew he was wrong was a physicist. In a sense they lacked the standing to take him on in public, on his home turf. You know exactly how that dynamic works. Here's William McCrea, who was in that 1935 room: "My instinct seemed to tell me that Eddington might be right. His arguments were superficially satisfying to me, and since they satisfied Eddington, I confess that I was content to let it go like that."

The pattern kept repeating. Later that same year Eddington gave a talk in Paris. Here's Chandra's own account: "Eddington gave an hour's talk, criticising my work extensively and making it into a joke. I sent a note to Russell, telling him I would wish to reply. Russell sent back a note saying, 'I prefer that you didn't.' And so I had no chance even to reply, and accepted the pitiful glances of the audience."

There was one evening, at least, when Eddington had to hear the truth to his face. July 1939, dinner at the high table in Cambridge. Chandra, Eddington, Dirac, and a young physicist named Maurice Pryce ended up together and adjourned afterward to keep arguing about relativistic degeneracy. Pryce carefully laid out Eddington's own argument back to him, to be sure he had it right. Eddington agreed the account was fair and accurate, then asked, almost blankly, "What was the argument about?" Pryce turned to Dirac and asked whether he'd agreed with any of it. Dirac said, "No." Pryce added that he didn't either. At which point Eddington, by Chandra's account, became genuinely angry, the only time Chandra ever saw it, rose from his chair, paced back and forth, and declared, "This matter is not for joking!" Then he spent the next hour tearing apart the very argument he'd endorsed a minute earlier.

The next day Eddington came up to Chandra and said he was disappointed that Dirac didn't seem to understand the implications of his own theory of the electron. Chandra, by now thoroughly done, asked him instead how much of his fundamental theory rested on his ideas about relativistic degeneracy. Eddington replied, "Why, all of it." Chandra said only, "I am only sorry." Not a polite thing to say. But by then, in his own words, he was really enraged with Eddington's supreme confidence in himself and his own ideas.

In Part 3, the fight nearly drives Chandra out of physics for good, and he goes looking for a way to live and work in the long shadow it cast.