No longer invisible
If current trends continue, I will have to go back to school. My education is filling up with knowledge gaps, as improbable as that idea might seem. Most recently, that photo of a black hole.
Let me recall what I learned in school. Gravity was invisible. A black hole was even more invisible, because light would not be able to escape. As someone with a lifelong interest in photography, I knew that “in the absence of light”, photos didn’t turn out. The dreaded black negative (akin to a black hole, but worse).
Don’t distract me with all the other facets of my education that are now out of date. This one is important. Because black holes couldn’t be seen, perhaps they only existed in the literature of science fiction.
Now, this afternoon, I came across an explanation of how something that could not be seen was finally “captured on film”. It involved a telescope that spans continents, and enough data to make the average torrent downloader give up due to the time constraints. We’re talking about petabytes of bits. A graduate student figured out how to squeeze all those points into some magical machine, and output the image shown above.
I’m impressed. This is more than “I don’t understand” magic; this is downright “what will we learn next” magic. Suddenly, all of my lenses and camera bodies seem unsuited to the needs of humanity. And as for me, I’ve examined the photograph. It doesn’t look, at all, like I had imagined. OK, I’d never really tried to imagine, but you get the idea. This is news!
