by David Farrell

‘Chandra’, as he was affectionately called by his friends, was born in 1928 in a small town in India. After receiving physics instruction from his father, plus bachelor and master degrees from universities in India, he was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford. In that year, 1949, he was the only Indian student to be so honored. 

In 1955, his academic career took an unusual direction for an Oxford PhD, namely, he joined the Westinghouse Electric Corporation’s research lab in Pittsburgh. As he later admitted…. “I wondered how I, a pure physicist, would fare in the midst of what I vaguely thought of as blacksmiths and ironmongers.” Despite this initial apprehension, he thoroughly enjoyed his time with them, rising to become manager of their Cryophysics Section. Superconducting magnets had seemed a pipe dream to many, but Chandra’s team made them a reality, and, in the face of stiff competition from other companies, Westinghouse was the first to bring them to market. 

During his final few months with the company, in the spring of 1963, he came up with an idea for a hitherto unobserved phenomenon in condensed matter, calling it ‘oscillatory magnetostriction’. In July of the same year, he published predictions for the size of the oscillations and they were discovered just a couple of months later, in an experimental collaboration between him and Ben Green, in the physics department at Western Reserve. After that, Reserve’s physics department had the wisdom to immediately hire him away from Westinghouse at the rank of full professor, despite the fact that he had never served anywhere in any of the lower ranks. 

In his twenty-five year career, at Western Reserve and subsequently Case Western Reserve, he took on many consulting and national governance assignments, for example, chairing the solid state division of the American Physical Society, then its largest division. His substantial contributions to governance here are documented in Baznik’s wonderfully detailed social history of our university. Sharing his fascination with superconductivity, I joined his group as a postdoc in 1964 and we finished up collaborating the entire time he was here, our final paper together being published in 1988, the year he retired. He still wasn’t done with research, accepting a visiting professor position at the Walther-Meissner-Institute in Germany and collaborating on many more papers there. 

We also shared a love for western classical music, and, since this is rather more widely shared than a fascination for superconductivity, I’ll conclude with a couple of music stories: Chandra spent considerable time and effort teaching himself to play the piano and bonded with other piano-playing physicists, for example, Brian Pippard, who led Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory for over a decade. Chandra accomplished so much in his career that it was hard to imagine him envying anybody’s lot in life, but he once admitted to me that Pippard had aroused that unpleasant emotion in him. And it was not, as one might have thought, because of his position at the world famous Cavendish. Rather, it was because of Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy, a beautiful but extremely difficult piano piece. Not only was it in Pippard’s repertoire, he performed it for Chandra, on his own piano. As a piano player of modest attainment myself, I shared Chandra’s feelings. Our final conversation took place last year, by phone, and was devoted entirely to music. He had often talked about Bach’s St. Matthew Passion and his B minor Mass, and I always concurred with his judgment that they are pinnacles of music—albeit pinnacles that were, at the time, largely inaccessible to myself. However, after listening to him, still animated and lucid at 92, reflecting on the joy that they had brought to his life, I vowed to spend much more time with them. I did so and they have become friends of inestimable value.