July 2: Brazil’s Great Physicist

Mario Schenberg, Brazil’s most important theoretical physicist, who researched the formation of supernova stars, was born in Recife on this date in 1914. In the 1940s, together with Indian physicist and Nobel laureate Subrahmanyan Chanrasekhar, he discovered the Schenberg-Chandrasekhar limit, which is the maximum mass of the core of a star prior to its gravitational collapse. Schenberg also made significant contributions to mathematics vis-a-vis quantum physics, and was widely respected as a writer and art critic. He was twice elected to be Sao Paulo state legislator on the Communist ticket; following Brazil’s 1964 military coup d’etat, he was forced into retirement by presidential decree and was jailed for several months (his second jailing for communist activism). He also received death threats from Brazilian neo-Nazis for his opposition to a joint Brazil-Germany plan to build nuclear power stations in Brazil in 1975. Schenberg died in 1990. To view a video about the “Mario Schenberg Space Ship,” an interactive educational program for kids at the University of Sao Paulo, click here.
“The energy disappears in the nucleus of the supernova as quickly as . . . money disappeared at that roulette table.”—Mario Schenberg