In a mesmerizing passage in his book, award winning science writer and former radio astronomer at the California Institute of Technology, Marcus Chown, painstakingly describes the seismic event of the sighting of the first ever black hole. In April 2017, a team of intrepid and maniacally enthusiastic groups of scientists set up eight Event Horizon Telescopes (EHTs), at eight sites across the world. The team strove to capture an image of a black hole by enhancing a technique permitting the imaging of far-away objects, known as Very Long Baseline Interferometry, or VLBI.

While the technical details of the stupendous accomplishment of the team is putting it mildly, dense, the paragraph encapsulating the moment of reckoning leaves the reader in a state of absolute catharsis. The hairs stand at the nape, eyes involuntarily begin to well as the infinitesimal finitude and position of humanity in the grand and transcendental scheme of the Cosmos hits home like a sledgehammer. The experience is humbling in its grandest sweep and sobering in its deepest wake.

An endearing take on Leonard Cohen’s evocative anthem, A Crack in Everything, begins on an unexpectedly poignant note. Karl Schwarzschild, a German physicist and astronomer, lay dying in a field hospital from the auto immune disease pemphigus, while serving in the first World War. Even while staring adversity in its face, Schwarzschild produced the first precise solution to the Einstein field equations of general relativity, for the limited case of a single spherical non-rotating mass. Today, Asteroid 837 Schwarzschilda is named in his honour, as is the large crater Schwarzschild, on the far side of the Moon.

The path pioneered by Schwarzschild was taken up in earnest by a reticent genius from India, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. The Astrophysicist and nephew of Sir Chandrasekhara Venkataraman, who won the Physics, Nobel in 1930, Chandrasekhar, dazzled the world by producing the spell binding concept now popularly attributed the moniker Chandrasekhar limit. This postulates that a star possessing a mass more than 1.44 times that of the Sun instead of forming a white dwarf, continues to collapse, blows off its gaseous envelope in a supernova explosion, and becomes a neutron star. However, instead of being revered for his singularly stunning achievement, this docile Astrophysicist was remorselessly and undeservingly snubbed in public by his own mentor, Arthur Eddington. This public humiliation and rebuke stalled further development in Chandrasekhar’s research for decades.

As Chown informs his readers, professional jealousies and sexism have always haunted the progress of science, and astronomy is no exception to the norm. Cecilia Payne, an intellect par excellence was not only denied a degree in Cambridge University, solely due to her sex, but was also completely discredited from her finding, while completing her PhD at the Harvard College Observatory, which discovered the sun to be composed of Hydrogen and Helium. This finding was completely contrary to the compositions as taken for granted by the male bastion and its entrenched dogma. A proficient astronomer, Henry Norris, not only proclaimed Payne’s findings to be ‘clearly impossible,’ without providing a shred of evidence in his defense, but also forced her to reject her findings. This despite Norris himself acknowledging that Payne’s doctoral research was the best he had ever read!

Black holes may pave the way for a comprehension of a deeper understanding of contemporaneous Physics according to Chown. In fact, Chown argues that the study of galaxies is rendered incomplete without accumulating a fundamental knowledge of supermassive black holes.

Marcus Chown’s compelling and fast paced book is more about the relentless contributions of personalities and characters whose selflessness and sacrifices contributed to the opening of an incredibly complicated and complex branch of Astronomy, which has made a phenomenal leap from the peripheral to the mainstream. This inextricable linkage between persistent human endeavour, perpetual faith and possibilities that are endless is what makes A Crack in Everything one of the best reads of the year for me.