[FRIAM] da foist pictures of a black hole

[Nick Thompson]

Eric, 

May I have leave to ask you a ==> really dumb question<==?  

What does it mean to say that we have "seen" a black hole?  It's a metaphor, right?  In the sense that saying that we have "seen" an electron is a metaphor.   And  there is a lot of equipment that has been aggressively designed to make that metaphor seem ... um ... less ... um... metaphorical.   Is the seeing of a black hole any more or less direct than the seeing of an electron?  

Thanks, if you have time to tangle with this. 

Nick 

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of Eric Smith
Sent: Wednesday, April 10, 2019 4:49 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] da foist pictures of a black hole

Indeed, Gil,

I was just on the piont of writing to the list, because I was surprised at no traffic on this stunner.

There is a photomontage I would love to have, which I think doesn’t exist yet, but now can.

Full M87 in the visible:
http://hubblesite.org/image/2391/gallery
(which I guess is about a 100-arcsecond image)

The M87 jet in the radio:
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/0007/m87jet_hst_big.jpg
(maybe 10-20 arcsecond scale)

The 7-arcsecond close-up of the jet in radio (VLA), X-ray (Chandra), and visible (Hubble), which is mostly motivated by understanding the “knot” they label HST-1:
http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2001/0134/M87_scale.jpg

And now the 50-microarcsecond images of the central black hole https://aasnova.org/2019/04/10/first-images-of-a-black-hole-from-the-event-horizon-telescope/

To see a world in a grain of sand.


So one good thing will have happened today,

Eric






> On Apr 11, 2019, at 7:28 AM, Gillian Densmore <gil.densmore at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/10/science/black-hole-picture.html
> 
> ^ now that is amazing. Keep kicking arse science! 
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