To See the Unseeable
“A smoke ring framing a one-way portal to eternity” is how the New York Times described the first-ever image of a black hole, released last April. A staple more of science fiction than of reality, these bizarre objects have a gravitational force that consumes everything around them, including light. Their behavior is so unusual, so logic-defying, that even Albert Einstein doubted their existence. But last spring, a hazy picture of a glowing orange circle was viewed and shared by a billion earthlings, joining a history of epoch-defining photographs that elicit reflection on our place in the cosmos. How did scientists create an image of the strangest of celestial objects at the center of a distant galaxy, fifty-five million light-years away?
Peter Galison, a Harvard physicist and historian, worked on the project. Here, he recounts how astronomers, physicists, computer scientists, and others teamed up to allow us to see the unseeable.
Elizabeth Kessler: You’re a member of the Black Hole Initiative, an interdisciplinary science center at Harvard University that includes astronomers, physicists, mathematicians, and philosophers. How did you, as a philosopher and a historian of science, get involved with that work?
Peter Galison: My career trajectory has been back and forth between physics and the history and philosophy of science. Back in the Pleistocene, I did two dissertations, one in theoretical particle physics and one in the history of science.
EK: Through that initiative you got involved with working on the Event Horizon Telescope’s first-ever image of a black hole, which was released with and and . What are the qualities of black holes that make them so strange?
