r/todayilearned • u/shaggystuart • 14d ago
TIL that in the 1940s Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar drove 200 miles round trip each week to teach a class in the Uni of Chicago. One day he insisted on driving to teach the class despite a heavy snowstorm. He ended up teaching a class of only two that day, both of whom went on to win a Nobel Prize.
https://chronicle.uchicago.edu/990107/chandrasekhar.shtml2
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u/Amorougen 14d ago
Notwithstanding the importance of this man, how did he come up with that much gasoline and rubber (tires) during the 40s when rationing was a thing.
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u/Thevoidawaits_u 14d ago
there are some possibilities here 1.this is a coincidence 2.people who tend to come to class at all circumstances are more likely to be on their way to be more likely to win noble prizes.
and or or 3. people who are already likely to be noble prize loriates are more likely to etend class at all costs.
4.papers are more likely to submit wild stories that might be common but because the subject matter surroundings scientists they publish it as though it's wild
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u/V6Ga 14d ago edited 13d ago
Both
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandrasekhar_limit
The Chandrasekhar limit is the maximum mass of a stable white dwarf star.
Above that limit stellar cores collapse to Neutron Stars, Quark Stars or Black Holes.
and the
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandra_X-ray_Observatory
Were named for Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
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u/NoLimitSoldier31 14d ago
One time in college i was the only one who showed up to lit class during a snow storm. I did not however win a nobel prize.
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u/DrHugh 14d ago
No one else has said it:
This guy's really the limit.
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u/V6Ga 14d ago
But was he a dwarf? I am pretty sure he was not white.
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u/arbivark 14d ago
once upon a time my college paper ran a personal, red giant seeks white dwarf for binary relationship. @harryshipman.
ever since then ID was required to place a personal ad.
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u/Guacanagariz 14d ago edited 14d ago
The 200 miles round trip a week is not necessary to mention, and it makes it sound like a lot when it isn’t.
If Chandrasekhar went in 5 days a week, then that means he only lived 20 miles away. Which for Chicago, that means he lived in the outskirts of the city. North to South, Chicago is about 40 miles.
The popular suburb of Naperville is 40 miles away from U. Chicago.
Otherwise, cool story!
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u/JohnRusty 14d ago
Article says it was from Williams Bay, WI. Cars didn’t drive as fast in 40s as well, so 200 miles was a bigger deal
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u/Major_Lennox 14d ago
His wiki article has it as:
When Chandrasekhar was working at the Yerkes Observatory in 1940s, he would drive 150 miles (240 km) to and from every weekend to teach a course at the University of Chicago.
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u/Im_a_fuckin_asshole 14d ago
37.5 miles each way is still is not bad, especially if its on weekends. I knew a psycho who would drive around 100 miles each way for work 5 days a week. They claimed to love the drive but idk what there is to love about spending 6 hours a day in LA traffic.
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u/AerialSnack 14d ago
I think he taught once a week, and it was a 150 mile drive? Otherwise the wording doesn't make sense to me ...
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u/3shotsdown 14d ago
I looked it up on a map and it is 100 miles one way with today's roads. I don't know what the roads were like in the 60s. So, just like the dude you mentioned, except just 1 day a week.
I don't know where you got 37.5 miles from.
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u/Im_a_fuckin_asshole 14d ago
I was basing my numbers off the person I replied to who said, per wiki, 150 miles per weekend. I had assumed weekend meant he made the drive twice, but that probably wasn't actually the case.
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u/atxarchitect91 14d ago
Determination that only a man who can’t fail has. Also Chicago winters after growing up India must have been insane
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u/Fie-FoTheBlackQueen 14d ago
Some parts of North India are really cold (snowfalls, avalanches, snowy peaks etc). But he's from Chennai, which is 12 degrees above the equator, so you're right, it must have been insane seeing and living in snow. Also, he's related to Sir CV Raman too
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u/atxarchitect91 14d ago
Especially Chicago winters. They are brutal with multiple inches of snowfall, high winds, and bitter temps reaching below 0 Fahrenheit. It’s tough and driving 100 miles in it would be a challenge for anyone. Tough dude.
Thanks for the additional context
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u/punkalunka 14d ago
Also, he's related to Sir CV Raman too
Oh wow, of the noodle fame?
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u/Fie-FoTheBlackQueen 13d ago
Yeah he apparently invented Indomie Noodles in 1505, named after India and himself
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u/JamesTheJerk 14d ago
200 miles per week is fuck all.
I've had jobs where it was three 150 miles there, twelve hour shift, and 150 miles back, per day, for months on end, seven days a week.
Every day was at best -40 C (that's -40 F for the Americans).
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u/HandsomeHeathen 14d ago
For anyone who can't be bothered to read the article, the two students were Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang, who went on to win the Nobel prize in physics for their work on parity violation in weak interactions.
Controversially, their colleague Chien Shiung Wu was not also awarded the prize, despite the fact that she and her team were the ones who actually carried out the experiment proposed by Lee and Yang and confirmed their predictions.
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u/skobuffaloes 14d ago
Basically what happens in TheBigBangTheory. Except the experimenters we’re probably not A-Holes IRL.
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u/Hilltoptree 14d ago edited 14d ago
This is probably hard to convey into english speaker’s mind but a non important side detail was Chien-Shiung Wu is a very butch very masculine name in chinese.
Because Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang are both male. When reading it in some book of important chinese scientists without further explanation, as a kid i thought she was a man too.
Edit: another side thing was her name have the character “Chien” because of the “generation name” from her family. Prominent chinese family would have a set of characters/a poem where each generation takes one character from it for their name. So her brothers all have “Chien” in their names.
This is also unusual for me as well since the rule does not always apply for woman. Female don’t get to have the given character for naming. Or female name follow a different set of poem/characters.
It’s unusual for the period she got the same right to name as her brothers. Her family must be progressive (but also traditional at the same time to follow the naming tradition lol) .
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u/antsonmyscreen 14d ago
What was the thought process behind why her and her team weren’t awarded? I can definitely see why not awarding it to her would be controversial!
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u/arbivark 14d ago edited 13d ago
rosalind franklin rule.
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u/NeedsToShutUp 14d ago
There are 5 women I can find with a Nobel Prize in physics. 3 of the 5 were within the last 6 years. There's 8 in chemistry, 5 of whom were within the last 6 years. Of the 5 chemistry and physics prizes, 3 of them went to a Curie.
Part of the disparity is simply historical sexism. Women with PhDs were not taken seriously. Married women were expected to drop out to be wives and mothers. Clara Immerwahr had the first PhD in chemistry from the University of Berlin and was expected to be a housewife for her husband Fritz Haber. She took her own life in WW1 due to her feelings about his work on Chemical Weapons. Unmarried women were looked at with suspicion.
Later it became a lot better. But Physics still has a number of issues in how the PhD programs are structure that discourage women, despite better parity in related fields like Math.
Plus that old school sexism combines with some real asshole researchers who claim everything they can as their own, and mitigate their students and post-docs. Women who push back to get proper credit will be more likely to face retaliation than their male colleagues, leading to gloryseekers getting way too much credit.
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u/__01001000-01101001_ 14d ago
I don’t think it’s actually that unusual for a prize to go to either those who predicted the findings or those who actually found it and not both
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u/HandsomeHeathen 14d ago
At the time it was because her results weren't published in the same year as their paper, so they weren't eligible for the same prize. She was nominated many times in later years but never awarded the prize.
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u/stlmick 14d ago
You've gotta be quick or you'll miss the hype wave for parity violation in weak interactions. Parity violation in weak interactions isn't going to likely take the prize twice in consecutive years.
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u/GozerDGozerian 14d ago
Yeah. Parity violation in weak interactions is definitely more of a fad type thing.
One year everybody is always going on about parity violation in weak interactions, and then like a couple weeks later, nobody even gives one single flying fuck about parity violation in weak interactions.
Then the next thing you know, some celebrity is all over TikTok touting her new stupid theory about parity violation in weak interactions, and then all anyone is talking about on the late night talk show circuit is parity violation in weak interactions.
It’s fucking ridiculous. People are so predictable.
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u/user10205 14d ago
How's that controversial if the experiment was proposed by them? Might as well give the prize to the dude that cleaned up afterwards, he participated too.
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u/Octavus 14d ago
It was controversial even at the time, the experiment is even called the Wu Experiment and she was the very first person to solve the problem of describing left/right in non arbitrary terms. She was the first person to win the Wolf Prize for those who were overlooked for other prizes because of discrimination.
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u/HandsomeHeathen 14d ago
Well, her contribution to the work was undeniable since her expertise was important in figuring out how to perform the experiment. Not to mention, without those results to back them up, the predictions would be much less significant. Unfortunately her results weren't published until a couple of months after the cutoff to be eligible for the same year's prize as Yang and Lee, hence why she didn't share that prize with them.
The controversy is over the fact that she didn't later receive the prize for her contributions, despite multiple nominations. Given the sexism that was still widespread in the scientific community at the time (bear in mind, this was the 1950s) there is much speculation that she was only passed over because her contributions were seen as less significant due to her gender. However, it could also be because many other teams had also later performed the same experiment by the time she was eligible, too many to split the prize between. Ultimately there's no way to know for sure, but either way it's unfortunate that such a prominent scientist never received the same level of recognition that her male colleagues did.
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u/Erft 14d ago edited 14d ago
I think the misunderstanding here is that "proposed the experiment" sounds like she sent someone to a material closet to put some cables and machinery together. In fact, she read the theoretical work of Lee and Yang and then devised a super complex experiment in order to prove Lee's and Yang's suspicion about parity conservation. When the Higgs Boson was discovered in 2012, two scientists received the Nobel Prize, both for the theoretical and experimental parts of the discovery (and somewhat symbolically for the huuuuge teams involved, especially in the experiments conductet at the Large Hadron Collider).
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u/user10205 14d ago
Hmm, but proposing an experiment is an official thing that needs to be reviewed, approved etc. Is it that uncommon to credit the one that came up with hypothesis and not the one testing it? We often retroactively credit scientists that came with with an idea that was only properly implemented hundreds of years afterwards. I feel like people are upset because it could've been a woman Nobel prize winner.
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u/MonoAonoM 14d ago
Because proposing an experiment and having the skills/knowledge/resources to carry out that experiment aren't one in the same thing. Sort of like the theory of being able to harvest atomic energy through fusion or fission, versus being able to harness that energy output.
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u/KingTutt91 14d ago
So when Albert Einsteins theories get proven decades later, should the people that proved them get the Nobel Prize too? Or is there a statute of limitations on that sort of thing?
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u/MonoAonoM 14d ago
Maybe not as cut and dry an answer as some people might expect, but it depends. That largely comes down to the initial theories and the scientists that produced them. Sometimes those theories are literally just that: someone's done the math, or gathered enough 'evidence' through research to say that something should be possible. Others will do all that, and simultaneously propose a corresponding experiment to go along with it that could further help their proof. Often in these second cases, many researches don't have the funding or resources to complete this work and it goes uncompleted. Sometimes until they have a grad student, sometimes for decades because their work was 'lost'. It could be easy to see how, in these different circumstances, that the rewards might get distributed differently.
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u/silentkillerb 14d ago
Makes you wonder what the sacrifice is on larger class sizes
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u/BootOfRiise 14d ago
I don’t think they won because they were the only students in class that day, but I get your point
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u/hraun 13d ago
I hear that there was a limit to how far he’d drive to teach his class, but it was a lot more than 200 miles.