Event Horizon - Black Hole Live
Discussion
I am really disappointed and saddened by this type of reaction to this story. Have people REALLY lost total confidence in EVERY aspect of scientific endeavour to the point that they think this is all somehow made up?
That is truly shocking to me and a reflection on the state of mind of those who post such comments rather than the honest endeavour of the scientists and engineers who made such a huge effort to obtain these results.
I sometimes feel we are entering a new Dark Age - an age where everything is doubted and nothing is trusted. Facts are dismissed and honest toil discouraged.
What a disaster for Western society.
That is truly shocking to me and a reflection on the state of mind of those who post such comments rather than the honest endeavour of the scientists and engineers who made such a huge effort to obtain these results.
I sometimes feel we are entering a new Dark Age - an age where everything is doubted and nothing is trusted. Facts are dismissed and honest toil discouraged.
What a disaster for Western society.
Eric Mc said:
I am really disappointed and saddened by this type of reaction to this story. Have people REALLY lost total confidence in EVERY aspect of scientific endeavour to the point that they think this is all somehow made up?
That is truly shocking to me and a reflection on the state of mind of those who post such comments rather than the honest endeavour of the scientists and engineers who made such a huge effort to obtain these results.
I sometimes feel we are entering a new Dark Age - an age where everything is doubted and nothing is trusted. Facts are dismissed and honest toil discouraged.
What a disaster for Western society.
Too much doom and gloom as ever Eric. You are effectively arguing for sound bite science. The vast majority of people will see the news. Either be totally uninterested or clap. The disinterest or clapping will last about 5 seconds until the next news item comes on. The depth of understanding is shallow and sound bite.That is truly shocking to me and a reflection on the state of mind of those who post such comments rather than the honest endeavour of the scientists and engineers who made such a huge effort to obtain these results.
I sometimes feel we are entering a new Dark Age - an age where everything is doubted and nothing is trusted. Facts are dismissed and honest toil discouraged.
What a disaster for Western society.
Some of us go away and try to understand what's going on. We search the internet, we post on general discussion or even may get as far as looking on specialist websites. We admit to a lack of understanding and try to learn more. This has peaked my interest to go explore beyond the sound bite news. Should I just stop and clap? I think the only dark age here is the way you perceive query as criticism.
Only in my humble opinion so far, the amazing thing about this is the degree to which collaboration turned the planet into a telescope but I think you need to acknowledge the limitations of this and that the picture may not be as important as the collaboration.
julian64 said:
Eric Mc said:
I am really disappointed and saddened by this type of reaction to this story. Have people REALLY lost total confidence in EVERY aspect of scientific endeavour to the point that they think this is all somehow made up?
That is truly shocking to me and a reflection on the state of mind of those who post such comments rather than the honest endeavour of the scientists and engineers who made such a huge effort to obtain these results.
I sometimes feel we are entering a new Dark Age - an age where everything is doubted and nothing is trusted. Facts are dismissed and honest toil discouraged.
What a disaster for Western society.
Too much doom and gloom as ever Eric. You are effectively arguing for sound bite science. The vast majority of people will see the news. Either be totally uninterested or clap. The disinterest or clapping will last about 5 seconds until the next news item comes on. The depth of understanding is shallow and sound bite.That is truly shocking to me and a reflection on the state of mind of those who post such comments rather than the honest endeavour of the scientists and engineers who made such a huge effort to obtain these results.
I sometimes feel we are entering a new Dark Age - an age where everything is doubted and nothing is trusted. Facts are dismissed and honest toil discouraged.
What a disaster for Western society.
Some of us go away and try to understand what's going on. We search the internet, we post on general discussion or even may get as far as looking on specialist websites. We admit to a lack of understanding and try to learn more. This has peaked my interest to go explore beyond the sound bite news. Should I just stop and clap? I think the only dark age here is the way you perceive query as criticism.
Only in my humble opinion so far, the amazing thing about this is the degree to which collaboration turned the planet into a telescope but I think you need to acknowledge the limitations of this and that the picture may not be as important as the collaboration.
What annoys me are those people who immediately start doubting the veracity and integrity of the scientists involved. That's what concerns me.
There’s a stark difference between query and criticism. A query would be “how does radio interferometry work and why is this particular observation so important”. A criticism would be “this is interesting but I don’t trust it’s not fake - tell me why I should believe it”.
The former can be answered through debate and research. The latter starts from an assumption this is all a big hoax. I can understand if some random unknown-to-science individual had published a paper in an obscure non peer-reviewed journal, but 5 minutes of research would show this is the culmination of decades of work involving thousands of scientists.
The former can be answered through debate and research. The latter starts from an assumption this is all a big hoax. I can understand if some random unknown-to-science individual had published a paper in an obscure non peer-reviewed journal, but 5 minutes of research would show this is the culmination of decades of work involving thousands of scientists.
I'm with Eric on this.
if we all had the interest and attention span of some posters on here we would have never even looked up at the stars in wonder and we'd be looking for the next piece of instant gratification.
This image is just as important as the first sighting of Saturns' rings, of Titan's "volcanoes" or the Hubble deep field observations.
if we all had the interest and attention span of some posters on here we would have never even looked up at the stars in wonder and we'd be looking for the next piece of instant gratification.
This image is just as important as the first sighting of Saturns' rings, of Titan's "volcanoes" or the Hubble deep field observations.
Eric Mc said:
julian64 said:
Eric Mc said:
I am really disappointed and saddened by this type of reaction to this story. Have people REALLY lost total confidence in EVERY aspect of scientific endeavour to the point that they think this is all somehow made up?
That is truly shocking to me and a reflection on the state of mind of those who post such comments rather than the honest endeavour of the scientists and engineers who made such a huge effort to obtain these results.
I sometimes feel we are entering a new Dark Age - an age where everything is doubted and nothing is trusted. Facts are dismissed and honest toil discouraged.
What a disaster for Western society.
Too much doom and gloom as ever Eric. You are effectively arguing for sound bite science. The vast majority of people will see the news. Either be totally uninterested or clap. The disinterest or clapping will last about 5 seconds until the next news item comes on. The depth of understanding is shallow and sound bite.That is truly shocking to me and a reflection on the state of mind of those who post such comments rather than the honest endeavour of the scientists and engineers who made such a huge effort to obtain these results.
I sometimes feel we are entering a new Dark Age - an age where everything is doubted and nothing is trusted. Facts are dismissed and honest toil discouraged.
What a disaster for Western society.
Some of us go away and try to understand what's going on. We search the internet, we post on general discussion or even may get as far as looking on specialist websites. We admit to a lack of understanding and try to learn more. This has peaked my interest to go explore beyond the sound bite news. Should I just stop and clap? I think the only dark age here is the way you perceive query as criticism.
Only in my humble opinion so far, the amazing thing about this is the degree to which collaboration turned the planet into a telescope but I think you need to acknowledge the limitations of this and that the picture may not be as important as the collaboration.
What annoys me are those people who immediately start doubting the veracity and integrity of the scientists involved. That's what concerns me.
I have effectively hit a brick wall at the moment because I was disappointed by the talk on image processing when I realised it wasn't just knitting pictures together to make that image. I didn't know what I was expecting when someone said we are going to visualise a black hole here and not just the effect of a black hole, when (to my understanding) the image IS EXACTLY a picture of the effect of a back hole rather than any picture of a any sort of black hole structure.
I haven't doubted the veracity or integrity of anyone. I've actually listening to them talking about their own limitations.
https://www.ted.com/talks/katie_bouman_what_does_a...
BTW I think I'm in love with this girl, her enthusiasm is off the scale.
julian64 said:
I didn't accuse you of just watching the soundbite. Everyone that's ever seen you post will know you sit at the top of a mountain of background reading. You just need to be less dismissive of those with much less time on their hands who are still trying to get there.
I have effectively hit a brick wall at the moment because I was disappointed by the talk on image processing when I realised it wasn't just knitting pictures together to make that image. I didn't know what I was expecting when someone said we are going to visualise a black hole here and not just the effect of a black hole, when (to my understanding) the image IS EXACTLY a picture of the effect of a back hole rather than any picture of a any sort of black hole structure.
I haven't doubted the veracity or integrity of anyone. I've actually listening to them talking about their own limitations.
https://www.ted.com/talks/katie_bouman_what_does_a...
BTW I think I'm in love with this girl, her enthusiasm is off the scale.
I think I know when you are coming from, when I first read about this I thought, wow that is so cool, they have actually taken a picture of a black hole, however digging further what they have actually done is taken LOTS of data, used clever algorithms to extrapolate the rest, then fine tuned the data to make the data fit into an approximation of what they were expecting to see so while still very impressive, for me it loses quite a lot of the impact of "this is what a real black hole looks like" to "this is what we think a black hole looks like with the data we have managed to collect" which is a small but significant distinction IMO.I have effectively hit a brick wall at the moment because I was disappointed by the talk on image processing when I realised it wasn't just knitting pictures together to make that image. I didn't know what I was expecting when someone said we are going to visualise a black hole here and not just the effect of a black hole, when (to my understanding) the image IS EXACTLY a picture of the effect of a back hole rather than any picture of a any sort of black hole structure.
I haven't doubted the veracity or integrity of anyone. I've actually listening to them talking about their own limitations.
https://www.ted.com/talks/katie_bouman_what_does_a...
BTW I think I'm in love with this girl, her enthusiasm is off the scale.
Long, but worth a read:
Misty S. Boyer
Yesterday at 01:02 ·
There's a lot of news going on about the "black hole girl" right now, and how she's being given too much credit for her role in the historic first image of a black hole. Because this is too important, I want to set the record straight.
Once Katie Bouman became the "face" of the black hole photo, and articles began to call her "the woman behind the black hole photo", an assortment of people that I'm strongly inclined to call incels but won't decided to figure out just how much of a role she had in it. Why? You'd have to ask them. Something about her attractiveness, youthfulness, and femaleness disturbed them to the point where they had to go digging.
And after digging, they found Andrew Chael, who wrote an algorithm, and put his algorithm online. Andrew Chael worked on the black hole photo as well. And because people kept saying that Katie Bouman wrote "the algorithm", these people decided that "the algorithm" in question must be Chael's.
So they looked at Chael's GitHub repository and checked the history. The history showed that Andrew Chael made 850,000 commits to the GitHub repository, while Katie Bouman made only 2,400.
"Oh my god!" they all said. "He did almost all of the work on the algorithm and yet she's the one getting all of the credit!"
They dug a little deeper - but not much - and discovered that the algorithm that "ultimately" generated the world-famous photo was created a different man, named Mareki Honma.
"She's taken the credit from two men!" they gasped. "Feminism and the PC media is destroying everything!"
There were, of course, those who tried to be kind. "She's always said that this was a team effort," they said. "We don't blame her, we blame the media. She didn't ask to become the poster girl of a team project she barely contributed to."
Meanwhile, Andrew Chael - a gay man - tweeted in defense of her. He thanked people for congratulating him on the work he'd spent years on but clarified that if they were doing so as a part of a sexist attack on Katie Bouman, they should go away and reconsider their lives. He said that his work couldn't have happened without Katie.
And it turns out that he was the one who took the viral photo of Bouman, specifically because he didn't want her contributions to be lost to history
So I decided to find out for myself what Katie Bouman's actual contributions were. As a programmer, I'm well aware that the number of GitHub commits means nothing without context. And Chael himself clarified that the lines being counted in the commits were from automatic commits of large data files. The actual software was made up of 68,000 lines, and though he didn't count how many he did personally, someone else assessed that he wrote about 24,000 of those.
Whether 68,000 or 24,000-- it's more than 2,400 right? Why call it "her" algorithm, then?
Because there's more than one algorithm being referenced here. These people just don't realize it.
I'll work my way backward because it's easier to explain that way.
The photo that everyone is looking at, the world famous black hole photo? It's actually a composite photo. It was generated by an algorithm credited to Mareki Honma. Honma's algorithm, based on MRI technology, is used to "stitch together" photos and fill in the missing pixels by analyzing the surrounding pixels.
But where did the photos come from that are composited into this photo?
The photos making up the composite were generated by 4 separate teams, led by Katie Bouman, Andrew Chael, Kazu Akiyama, Michael Johnson, and Jose L Gomez. Each team was given a copy of the black hole data and isolated from each other. Between the four of them, they used two techniques - an older, traditional one called CLEAN, and a newer one called RML - to generate an image.
The purpose of this division and isolation of teams was deliberately done to test the accuracy of the black hole data they were all using. If four isolated teams using different algorithms all got similar results, that would indicate that the data itself was accurate.
And lo, that's exactly what happened. The data wasn't just good, it's the most accurate of its kind. 5 petabytes (millions of billions of bytes) worth of accurate black hole data.
But where did the data come from?
Eight radio telescopes around the world trained their attention on the night sky in the direction of this black hole. The black hole is some ungodly distance away, a relative speck amidst billions of celestial bodies. And what the telescopes caught was not only the data of the black hole but the data of everything else as well.
Data that would need to be sorted.
Clearly, it's not the sort of thing you can sort by hand. To separate the wheat (one specific black hole's data) from the chaff (literally everything else around and between here and there) required an algorithm that could identify and single it out, calculations that were crunched across 800 CPUs on a 40Gbit/s network. And given that the resulting black hole-specific data was 5 petabytes (hundreds of pounds worth of hard drives!) you can imagine that the original data set was many times larger.
The algorithm that accomplished this feat was called CHIRP, short for "Continuous High-resolution Image Reconstruction using Patch priors".
CHIRP was created by Katie Bouman.
At the age of 23, she knew nothing about black holes. Her field is computer science and artificial intelligence, topics she'd been involved in since high school. But she had a theory that black holes have shadows, and her algorithm was designed to find those shadows. Katie Bouman used a variety of what MIT called "clever algebraic solutions" to overcome the obstacles involved in creating the CHIRP algorithm. And though she had a team working to help her, her name comes first on the peer-reviewed documentation.
It's called the CHIRP algorithm because that's what she named it. It's the only reason these images could be created, and it's responsible for creating some of the images that were incorporated into the final image. It's the algorithm that made the effort of collecting all that data worth it. Any data analyst can tell you that you can't analyze or visualize data until it's been prepared first. Cleaned up. Narrowed down to the important information.
That's what Katie Bouman did, and after working as a data analyst for two years with a focus on this exact thing - data transformation - I can tell you it's not easy. It's not easy on the small data sets I worked with, where I could wind up spending a week looking for the patterns in a 68K Excel spreadsheet with only one month's worth of programming for a single TV station!
Katie Bouman's 2,400 line contribution to Andrew Chael's work is on top of all of her other work. She spent five years developing and refining the CHIRP algorithm before leading four teams in testing the data created. The data collection phase of this took 10 days in April 2017, when the eight telescopes simultaneously trained their gazes towards the black hole.
This photo was ultimately created as a way to test Katie Bouman's algorithm for accuracy. MIT says that it's far more accurate than similar predecessors. And it is the algorithm that gave us our first direct image of a black hole.
Around the internet, there are people who have the misperception that Katie Bouman is just the pretty face, a minor contributor to a project where men like Andrew Chael and Mareki Honma deserve the credit. There are people pushing memes and narratives that she's only being given such acclaim because of feminism. And because Katie Bouman refuses to say that this was anything other than a team effort, even the most flattering comments about her still place her contributions to the photo at equal or less-than-equal contribution to others.
But I'm writing to set the story straight:
When it is written that Katie Bouman is the woman "behind the black hole photo", it is objectively true.
When Andrew Chael says that his software could not have worked without her, he isn't just being a stand-up guy, he's being literal.
And while it's true that every one of the 200+ people involved placed an important role, Katie Bouman deserves every ounce of superstardom she receives.
If there must be a face to this project - and there usually is - then why shouldn't it be her, her fingers twined across her lips, her gleeful eyes luminous and wide with awe and joy.
Edited:
Thinking on it a little further, I felt I should clarify that I'm not actually trying to downplay Andrew Chael. His imaging algorithm is actually the result of years of effort, a labor of love. Each image that could be composited into the final photo brought with it a unique take on the data, without which the final photo wouldn't have been complete.
So let's take a moment to celebrate the fact that two of the most integral contributors to the first direct photo of a black hole
were a woman
and a gay man.
2nd Update (LONG!)
I went to bed at 19 shares on a post I wrote to vent to my FB friends, and now it's over 2K. I guess it's gone viral. That means I have some work to do.
I'm going to provide a list of the various articles I read to piece this together. When I wrote this, I wasn't trying to write an essay so I didn't put sources in and I didn't ensure that every detail is 100% accurate. So I'm doing that now.
Any edits I make are mentioned below (apart from spelling/grammar fixes). The resources that led me to write this are listed below. And because I value accuracy, I welcome people to point out mistakes of any kind. I'll make corrects and credit them here.
Edit: I incorrectly wrote that Bouman worked on the algorithm for 6 years and spent 2 years refining it. This was an accidental mush of facts: She's been working on this project for a total of 6 years (ages 23 to 29). She spent 3 years building CHIRP and 2 years refining it. I've corrected that and included that she led the four teams, as two separate articles mention it.
Edit: One of the leads for the 4 team project was a man named Jose L Gomez. I added that to the above, after being sent a twitter thread from Xu S. Han. Thank you! Twitter thread here:
https://twitter.com/saraissaoun/status/11163045226...
http://news.mit.edu/2016/method-image-black-holes-...
This is a 2016 MIT article announcing CHIRP. It gives a pretty excellent idea about the magnitude of Bouman's contribution.
https://www.extremetech.com/…/229675-mit-res...
This goes into detail about Katie Bouman's algorithm. It describes how her algorithm differs from normal/traditional interferometric algorithms. This article explains the difficulty she faced in how trying to capture a black hole is like trying to photograph "a grapefruit on the moon." This also explains how Bouman's algorithm made all of this work-- it combines all of the data from the participating telescopes into, in essence, one massive telescope.
https://youtu.be/BIvezCVcsYs
This is a 2016 TEDx talk from Bouman where she describes her work. Note: though I am intentionally focusing on her contributions specifically to defend the attend she's getting, she makes it clear that this was a team effort. She always gives credit to her teammates who work with her. She is full of humility and wonder.
http://people.csail.mit.edu/…/papers_an̷...
This is the paper based on Bouman's work, where she's listed as first author. The position of her name is important. While the meaning of being first author can differ in certain fields, I'm basing the 'primary contributor' interpretation on the fact that multiple other articles say she was lead, MIT refers to the algorithm as hers, as well as the fact that she named CHIRP.
https://github.com/achael/eht-imaging
This is Andrew Chael's imaging library available on GitHub. It's where our original "sleuths" discovered that Bouman had contributed very little and assumed that she was stealing the glory from others. NOTE: Andrew Chael didn't make these claims or ask for this sort of attention!
https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.06156
This is a paper describing Chael's work, which is impressive. Bouman is in the position of last author. Again, the relevance of the author order can differ, but the common significance of 'last author' is either the supervisor or the relative least contribution. In Bouman's paper, the position of last author seemed to indicate supervisor(s) based on the organization hierarchy on the EHT website. In this instance, I interpret Bouman's name being last as her being a minor contributor to Chael's specific work.
https://eventhorizontelescope.org/
This is the official EHT telescope website. I can't remember what I looked at here, it's in my history. I think I was trying to find out who Bouman's project lead was.
https://twitter.com/thisgreyspir…/status/111...
This is the twitter thread where Chael defends Katie. He explains that he didn't write 850K lines, defends Katie and says that his algorithm couldn't have worked without her, mentions his LGBTQ status, and more. He seems like a great guy.
https://physicstoday.scitation.org/…/10.1063...
This article speaks to some of the other people involved, including the project leader Sheperd Doeleman. This describes the process they went through in creating the black hole image and is where I got the information about how they split the teams into 4, and how the final image is a composite.
https://phys.org/…/2019-04-scientist-superst...
This is the article that talks about CHIRP sorting through a "true mountain" of data, and how that data was passed out to four teams to check for accuracy.
https://www.theguardian.com/…/black-hole-pic...
This article talks about Bouman coming up with a new algorithm to "stitch data across the EHT network" of telescopes, and how she led an elaborate series of tests (splitting the data up across four teams, etc) to verify that the output wasn't the result of a glitch or fluke.
http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201904110037.h...
This article explains Honma's significant role. It describes what Honma's algorithm does and how it was used in this project.
The final link is the document by all 200+ participants. This document is important because it gives such a clear idea of the work that went into this, the fabric of which Bouman is a part. While I intentionally highlight her contributions in defense of her, her statement that it was a team effort is true.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-82...
Misty S. Boyer
Yesterday at 01:02 ·
There's a lot of news going on about the "black hole girl" right now, and how she's being given too much credit for her role in the historic first image of a black hole. Because this is too important, I want to set the record straight.
Once Katie Bouman became the "face" of the black hole photo, and articles began to call her "the woman behind the black hole photo", an assortment of people that I'm strongly inclined to call incels but won't decided to figure out just how much of a role she had in it. Why? You'd have to ask them. Something about her attractiveness, youthfulness, and femaleness disturbed them to the point where they had to go digging.
And after digging, they found Andrew Chael, who wrote an algorithm, and put his algorithm online. Andrew Chael worked on the black hole photo as well. And because people kept saying that Katie Bouman wrote "the algorithm", these people decided that "the algorithm" in question must be Chael's.
So they looked at Chael's GitHub repository and checked the history. The history showed that Andrew Chael made 850,000 commits to the GitHub repository, while Katie Bouman made only 2,400.
"Oh my god!" they all said. "He did almost all of the work on the algorithm and yet she's the one getting all of the credit!"
They dug a little deeper - but not much - and discovered that the algorithm that "ultimately" generated the world-famous photo was created a different man, named Mareki Honma.
"She's taken the credit from two men!" they gasped. "Feminism and the PC media is destroying everything!"
There were, of course, those who tried to be kind. "She's always said that this was a team effort," they said. "We don't blame her, we blame the media. She didn't ask to become the poster girl of a team project she barely contributed to."
Meanwhile, Andrew Chael - a gay man - tweeted in defense of her. He thanked people for congratulating him on the work he'd spent years on but clarified that if they were doing so as a part of a sexist attack on Katie Bouman, they should go away and reconsider their lives. He said that his work couldn't have happened without Katie.
And it turns out that he was the one who took the viral photo of Bouman, specifically because he didn't want her contributions to be lost to history
So I decided to find out for myself what Katie Bouman's actual contributions were. As a programmer, I'm well aware that the number of GitHub commits means nothing without context. And Chael himself clarified that the lines being counted in the commits were from automatic commits of large data files. The actual software was made up of 68,000 lines, and though he didn't count how many he did personally, someone else assessed that he wrote about 24,000 of those.
Whether 68,000 or 24,000-- it's more than 2,400 right? Why call it "her" algorithm, then?
Because there's more than one algorithm being referenced here. These people just don't realize it.
I'll work my way backward because it's easier to explain that way.
The photo that everyone is looking at, the world famous black hole photo? It's actually a composite photo. It was generated by an algorithm credited to Mareki Honma. Honma's algorithm, based on MRI technology, is used to "stitch together" photos and fill in the missing pixels by analyzing the surrounding pixels.
But where did the photos come from that are composited into this photo?
The photos making up the composite were generated by 4 separate teams, led by Katie Bouman, Andrew Chael, Kazu Akiyama, Michael Johnson, and Jose L Gomez. Each team was given a copy of the black hole data and isolated from each other. Between the four of them, they used two techniques - an older, traditional one called CLEAN, and a newer one called RML - to generate an image.
The purpose of this division and isolation of teams was deliberately done to test the accuracy of the black hole data they were all using. If four isolated teams using different algorithms all got similar results, that would indicate that the data itself was accurate.
And lo, that's exactly what happened. The data wasn't just good, it's the most accurate of its kind. 5 petabytes (millions of billions of bytes) worth of accurate black hole data.
But where did the data come from?
Eight radio telescopes around the world trained their attention on the night sky in the direction of this black hole. The black hole is some ungodly distance away, a relative speck amidst billions of celestial bodies. And what the telescopes caught was not only the data of the black hole but the data of everything else as well.
Data that would need to be sorted.
Clearly, it's not the sort of thing you can sort by hand. To separate the wheat (one specific black hole's data) from the chaff (literally everything else around and between here and there) required an algorithm that could identify and single it out, calculations that were crunched across 800 CPUs on a 40Gbit/s network. And given that the resulting black hole-specific data was 5 petabytes (hundreds of pounds worth of hard drives!) you can imagine that the original data set was many times larger.
The algorithm that accomplished this feat was called CHIRP, short for "Continuous High-resolution Image Reconstruction using Patch priors".
CHIRP was created by Katie Bouman.
At the age of 23, she knew nothing about black holes. Her field is computer science and artificial intelligence, topics she'd been involved in since high school. But she had a theory that black holes have shadows, and her algorithm was designed to find those shadows. Katie Bouman used a variety of what MIT called "clever algebraic solutions" to overcome the obstacles involved in creating the CHIRP algorithm. And though she had a team working to help her, her name comes first on the peer-reviewed documentation.
It's called the CHIRP algorithm because that's what she named it. It's the only reason these images could be created, and it's responsible for creating some of the images that were incorporated into the final image. It's the algorithm that made the effort of collecting all that data worth it. Any data analyst can tell you that you can't analyze or visualize data until it's been prepared first. Cleaned up. Narrowed down to the important information.
That's what Katie Bouman did, and after working as a data analyst for two years with a focus on this exact thing - data transformation - I can tell you it's not easy. It's not easy on the small data sets I worked with, where I could wind up spending a week looking for the patterns in a 68K Excel spreadsheet with only one month's worth of programming for a single TV station!
Katie Bouman's 2,400 line contribution to Andrew Chael's work is on top of all of her other work. She spent five years developing and refining the CHIRP algorithm before leading four teams in testing the data created. The data collection phase of this took 10 days in April 2017, when the eight telescopes simultaneously trained their gazes towards the black hole.
This photo was ultimately created as a way to test Katie Bouman's algorithm for accuracy. MIT says that it's far more accurate than similar predecessors. And it is the algorithm that gave us our first direct image of a black hole.
Around the internet, there are people who have the misperception that Katie Bouman is just the pretty face, a minor contributor to a project where men like Andrew Chael and Mareki Honma deserve the credit. There are people pushing memes and narratives that she's only being given such acclaim because of feminism. And because Katie Bouman refuses to say that this was anything other than a team effort, even the most flattering comments about her still place her contributions to the photo at equal or less-than-equal contribution to others.
But I'm writing to set the story straight:
When it is written that Katie Bouman is the woman "behind the black hole photo", it is objectively true.
When Andrew Chael says that his software could not have worked without her, he isn't just being a stand-up guy, he's being literal.
And while it's true that every one of the 200+ people involved placed an important role, Katie Bouman deserves every ounce of superstardom she receives.
If there must be a face to this project - and there usually is - then why shouldn't it be her, her fingers twined across her lips, her gleeful eyes luminous and wide with awe and joy.
Edited:
Thinking on it a little further, I felt I should clarify that I'm not actually trying to downplay Andrew Chael. His imaging algorithm is actually the result of years of effort, a labor of love. Each image that could be composited into the final photo brought with it a unique take on the data, without which the final photo wouldn't have been complete.
So let's take a moment to celebrate the fact that two of the most integral contributors to the first direct photo of a black hole
were a woman
and a gay man.
=========================================
2nd Update (LONG!)
I went to bed at 19 shares on a post I wrote to vent to my FB friends, and now it's over 2K. I guess it's gone viral. That means I have some work to do.
I'm going to provide a list of the various articles I read to piece this together. When I wrote this, I wasn't trying to write an essay so I didn't put sources in and I didn't ensure that every detail is 100% accurate. So I'm doing that now.
Any edits I make are mentioned below (apart from spelling/grammar fixes). The resources that led me to write this are listed below. And because I value accuracy, I welcome people to point out mistakes of any kind. I'll make corrects and credit them here.
Edit: I incorrectly wrote that Bouman worked on the algorithm for 6 years and spent 2 years refining it. This was an accidental mush of facts: She's been working on this project for a total of 6 years (ages 23 to 29). She spent 3 years building CHIRP and 2 years refining it. I've corrected that and included that she led the four teams, as two separate articles mention it.
Edit: One of the leads for the 4 team project was a man named Jose L Gomez. I added that to the above, after being sent a twitter thread from Xu S. Han. Thank you! Twitter thread here:
https://twitter.com/saraissaoun/status/11163045226...
http://news.mit.edu/2016/method-image-black-holes-...
This is a 2016 MIT article announcing CHIRP. It gives a pretty excellent idea about the magnitude of Bouman's contribution.
https://www.extremetech.com/…/229675-mit-res...
This goes into detail about Katie Bouman's algorithm. It describes how her algorithm differs from normal/traditional interferometric algorithms. This article explains the difficulty she faced in how trying to capture a black hole is like trying to photograph "a grapefruit on the moon." This also explains how Bouman's algorithm made all of this work-- it combines all of the data from the participating telescopes into, in essence, one massive telescope.
https://youtu.be/BIvezCVcsYs
This is a 2016 TEDx talk from Bouman where she describes her work. Note: though I am intentionally focusing on her contributions specifically to defend the attend she's getting, she makes it clear that this was a team effort. She always gives credit to her teammates who work with her. She is full of humility and wonder.
http://people.csail.mit.edu/…/papers_an̷...
This is the paper based on Bouman's work, where she's listed as first author. The position of her name is important. While the meaning of being first author can differ in certain fields, I'm basing the 'primary contributor' interpretation on the fact that multiple other articles say she was lead, MIT refers to the algorithm as hers, as well as the fact that she named CHIRP.
https://github.com/achael/eht-imaging
This is Andrew Chael's imaging library available on GitHub. It's where our original "sleuths" discovered that Bouman had contributed very little and assumed that she was stealing the glory from others. NOTE: Andrew Chael didn't make these claims or ask for this sort of attention!
https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.06156
This is a paper describing Chael's work, which is impressive. Bouman is in the position of last author. Again, the relevance of the author order can differ, but the common significance of 'last author' is either the supervisor or the relative least contribution. In Bouman's paper, the position of last author seemed to indicate supervisor(s) based on the organization hierarchy on the EHT website. In this instance, I interpret Bouman's name being last as her being a minor contributor to Chael's specific work.
https://eventhorizontelescope.org/
This is the official EHT telescope website. I can't remember what I looked at here, it's in my history. I think I was trying to find out who Bouman's project lead was.
https://twitter.com/thisgreyspir…/status/111...
This is the twitter thread where Chael defends Katie. He explains that he didn't write 850K lines, defends Katie and says that his algorithm couldn't have worked without her, mentions his LGBTQ status, and more. He seems like a great guy.
https://physicstoday.scitation.org/…/10.1063...
This article speaks to some of the other people involved, including the project leader Sheperd Doeleman. This describes the process they went through in creating the black hole image and is where I got the information about how they split the teams into 4, and how the final image is a composite.
https://phys.org/…/2019-04-scientist-superst...
This is the article that talks about CHIRP sorting through a "true mountain" of data, and how that data was passed out to four teams to check for accuracy.
https://www.theguardian.com/…/black-hole-pic...
This article talks about Bouman coming up with a new algorithm to "stitch data across the EHT network" of telescopes, and how she led an elaborate series of tests (splitting the data up across four teams, etc) to verify that the output wasn't the result of a glitch or fluke.
http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201904110037.h...
This article explains Honma's significant role. It describes what Honma's algorithm does and how it was used in this project.
The final link is the document by all 200+ participants. This document is important because it gives such a clear idea of the work that went into this, the fabric of which Bouman is a part. While I intentionally highlight her contributions in defense of her, her statement that it was a team effort is true.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-82...
julian64 said:
I have effectively hit a brick wall at the moment because I was disappointed by the talk on image processing when I realised it wasn't just knitting pictures together to make that image. I didn't know what I was expecting when someone said we are going to visualise a black hole here and not just the effect of a black hole, when (to my understanding) the image IS EXACTLY a picture of the effect of a back hole rather than any picture of a any sort of black hole structure.
I haven't doubted the veracity or integrity of anyone. I've actually listening to them talking about their own limitations.
https://www.ted.com/talks/katie_bouman_what_does_a...
BTW I think I'm in love with this girl, her enthusiasm is off the scale.
All you're doing is expressing your own lack of understanding. Rather than allowing yourself to hit a brick wall when your preconceptions are disabused why not spend a bit of time understanding the problem they were actually trying to tackle and then the solution they arrived at? I haven't doubted the veracity or integrity of anyone. I've actually listening to them talking about their own limitations.
https://www.ted.com/talks/katie_bouman_what_does_a...
BTW I think I'm in love with this girl, her enthusiasm is off the scale.
p1stonhead said:
MartG said:
Disgusting but not surprising stuff about useless people who could never get a girl due to living in their mum's basement being annoyed about a girl getting credit for stuff
Not surprising in the least. 
The other thing I don't understand about the picture is that the black hole is a 3d sphere of very high gravity. The plasma which is the orange flare around the outside is in a perfect perpendicular plane., rather than a covering outer skin that I would associate with a sphere.
If it were a covering outer skin the orange should drape across the black centre rather than see a perfect black hole?
So is a black hole a sphere, or a disc?
.
.
.
In no way are the above comments questioning anyone's veracity, and yes I know I'm stupid.
If it were a covering outer skin the orange should drape across the black centre rather than see a perfect black hole?
So is a black hole a sphere, or a disc?
.
.
.
In no way are the above comments questioning anyone's veracity, and yes I know I'm stupid.
julian64 said:
The other thing I don't understand about the picture is that the black hole is a 3d sphere of very high gravity. The plasma which is the orange flare around the outside is in a perfect perpendicular plane., rather than a covering outer skin that I would associate with a sphere.
Diffuse clouds of material orbiting gravitational wells tend to eventually to form disks......https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accretion_disk
eharding said:
julian64 said:
The other thing I don't understand about the picture is that the black hole is a 3d sphere of very high gravity. The plasma which is the orange flare around the outside is in a perfect perpendicular plane., rather than a covering outer skin that I would associate with a sphere.
Diffuse clouds of material orbiting gravitational wells tend to eventually to form disks......https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accretion_disk
Gassing Station | Science! | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff