Quotations

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar


View the biography of Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar


In some strange way, any new fact or insight that I may have found has not seemed to me as a discovery
of mine, but rather something that had always been there and that I had chanced to pick up.
Truth and Beauty: Aesthetics and Motivations in Science (1987)
The pursuit of science has often been compared to the scaling of mountains, high and not so high. But who amongst us can hope, even in imagination, to scale the Everest and reach its summit when the sky is blue and the air is still, and in the stillness of the air survey the entire Himalayan range in the dazzling white of the snow stretching to infinity? None of us can hope for a comparable vision of nature and of the universe around us. But there is nothing mean or lowly in standing in the valley below and awaiting the sun to rise over Kinchinjunga.
The black holes of nature are the most perfect macroscopic objects there are in the Universe: the only elements in their construction are our concepts of space and time.