Peter Galison - Imaging the Black Hole: The Past Propelling Us into the Future

Over the course of the development of modern science, atlases depicting the working objects of inquiry—from bodies, clouds, plants, to crystals and insects-, scientists worked out what counted as scientific objectivity. This long-term history, with its various takes on what a reliable image should be, converged in the years-long struggle of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) to produce a robust picture of a black hole. April 10, 2019 (of the supermassive black hole M87*) and then again May 12, 2022 (of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way), the team released the first images of a black hole, images viewed within a very few days of each release by more than a billion people. This presentation, back and forth between science, history, and documentary footage, about how the EHT team of some 200 scientists came to judge the glowing, crescent-like ring as objective. Here is a history propelling us into future of imaging black holes.