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Here's the permanent dedicated link to my first Hey, Mom! post and the explanation of the feature it contains.

Tuesday, April 23, 2019

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1524 - The Picture of the Black Hole and the Misognyny that followed


A Sense of Doubt blog post #1524 - The Picture of the Black Hole and the Misognyny that followed


So, I am behind again. I have to figure out how to make my week work, so that I am not posting four or five entries on Saturday and Sunday because that's not so daily, innit?

Anywho, I had this one set up to go because it's cool. At first, I had linked an initial story of the first picture of a black hole from WIRED, and then I added an article Kurzweil posted claiming that black holes could be a mathematical impossibility. This claim will make some wonder how then we have a picture of a black hole. Indeed.

Before I add that answer, allow me to share the nature of other content. In between these two articles is some content from Facebook about some serious misogyny directed at Dr. Katie Bouman, the principle scientist responsible for the work. I added some Twitter messages as well that tell the tale.

If you read on, you will come across the "information loss paradox" of how black holes exist and yet what they do (remove anything from our universe) cannot exist. Neither idea negates the picture of the black hole, which was constructued via algorithm from data gathered over a five day period; thus, it is not a "snapshot," an instant in time as most people think of photographs.

For some reason, and interestingly given what follows, the WIRED article does not mention Dr. Bouman.

Read on. Insecure male scientists (and non-scientists) are very threatened by women who accomplish things in science and want to take the credit away from them.

We live in a time in which not only are FACTS UNDER FIRE and a sector of the government that would turn our country into something far worse than the HANDMAID'S TALE.

In little ways, by denying the work of women scientists, we're already there.

The Event Horizon Telescope has captured a photo of a supermassive black hole at the center of M87, a galaxy 54 million light years away.
EVENT HORIZON TELESCOPE COLLABORATION ET AL.




SCIENTISTS REVEAL THE FIRST PICTURE OF A BLACK HOLE

IN THE CENTURY since Einstein predicted the existence of black holes in his theory of gravity, astrophysicists have turned up overwhelming evidence for the things. They’ve observed the push and pull of black holes on the orbits of nearby stars and planets. They’ve heard the vibrations, or gravitational waves, resonating from black holes colliding. But they’d never glimpsed a black hole face to face—until now. On Wednesday, astrophysicists announced they had captured the first-ever image of a black hole.
The picture, taken over five days of observations in April 2017 using eight telescopes around the world by a collaboration known as the Event Horizon Telescope, depicts luminous gas swirling around a supermassive black hole at the center of M87, a galaxy 54 million light-years away. Past the bright lights, though, is the black hole’s telltale feature: its event horizon. The event horizon is the edge of the spacetime abyss, where gravity is so strong that no light can escape from it. “It’s the point of no return,” says Feryal Özel of the University of Arizona, who is a member of the EHT collaboration. In the image, it manifests itself as the “sudden absence of light,” she says.
Previously, researchers had captured a blobby jet of light emerging from where the M87 black hole was predicted to be—but they couldn’t definitively see the black hole because their instruments were nowhere near as sharp as EHT’s. “It’s like going from a cheap smartphone camera to a high definition IMAX cinema,” says astrophysicist Andrew Strominger of Harvard University, who was not involved in the work.

The South Pole Telescope, one of eight telescopes used to capture the first black hole image.

This black hole is about 6.5 billion times the mass of the sun. Still, it’s tiny from a vantage point on Earth, less than 50 microarcseconds wide in the sky, which makes it about as hard to see as a donut placed on the moon. It took eight different telescopes to image it. The telescopes collected observational data that was synced with the precision of a billionth of a second.
To see the black hole’s boundary between light and dark, the astrophysicists captured radio waves—light 1.3 millimeters in wavelength, invisible to the human eye—emitted by the gas swirling around the black hole. The gas emits light of all different wavelengths, including visible light, but the researchers chose this particular wavelength because it can sail through entire galaxies and even Earth’s own atmosphere without being absorbed. But they still needed good weather at all eight of their telescope sites to see the black hole. Before switching on their telescopes, they had to monitor the moisture in the air, says Özel—too much humidity would ruin their images. To minimize the chance of rain, they built the telescopes in dry regions, including the South Pole and the Atacama Desert in Chile.
M87's black hole is relatively close to Earth, as the light coming from it was only emitted 54 million years ago—so we’re seeing it at a more mature moment in its existence. “At this point in the age of the universe, black holes have calmed down,” says Özel. “They’re basically eating gas trickling in from nearby stars.” M87’s black hole does emit bright jets of gas, but it’s still pretty dim compared to younger black holes that are further away. These younger black holes accumulate larger amounts of matter, so their swirls of luminous gas shine brighter.







To capture and interpret the first black hole image, scientists first created millions of simulations like this one.
CHI-KWAN CHAN/UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA

It took two decades of work to capture the image. Part of that effort was designing, building, and hauling the hardware to various telescope sites. But they also had to anticipate what they might see by nailing down the physics of black holes as accurately as possible. Özel, who has been working on photographing a black hole since her graduate student days in 2000, says that they’ve created millions of simulations of black holes, each with different mass, spin speed, or orientation, among other things. These simulations helped inform how they designed their telescopes and where they pointed them.
But they weren’t just after a pretty picture. In the zoo of astronomical objects, black holes are among the most extreme entities to exist. A black hole, as currently understood, packs an enormous amount of mass into a single point, making it—literally—an infinitely dense object. This density creates a huge gravitational pull into its center, which no one can peer inside. “They are the only objects in the universe that create a region of spacetime inaccessible to the rest of the universe,” says Özel. Because black holes are so extreme, researchers want to study their features to see if they are consistent with the rest of general relativity. “We all feel we have an intuitive sense of what space and time are. But Einstein told us that’s true only in situations like the ones we’re used to, where the gravitational field is very weak,” says Strominger. “When the gravitational field gets strong, there are all sorts of crazy things that happen.”
Everything they’ve observed so far about M87—its mass and the size of its event horizon—is consistent with Einstein's theory. But future, more detailed observations could reveal unexpected features. Strominger wants to see more detailed images of a fast-spinning black hole like M87. According to theoretical calculations, if black holes spin fast enough, they form a wormhole in spacetime. Future black hole images could help confirm or refute these hypotheses. Strominger is anticipating the day when images are good enough to see a black hole with its associated wormhole. “This is really, really weird science fiction stuff, and we’re going to be seeing it,” he says.
This image is just the beginning, says Özel. They want to pivot their telescopes toward other black holes, to amass a whole scrapbook of black hole images. They also plan to take more, better-quality pictures of this black hole to understand it in more detail. Now that they’ve finally stared into the eyes of the beast, it’s time to watch how it behaves.

















Misty S. Boyer
April 12 at 5:02 PM
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/1116304522660519936…
http://news.mit.edu/2016/method-image-black-holes-0606
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-researcher-develop…
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_an…/cvpr2016_bouman.pdf
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/1116518544961830918
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/PT.6.1.2…/full/
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-superstar-katie-bouman…
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-picture-captured-f…
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.html
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/10.3847/2041-8213/ab0ec7























http://www.kurzweilai.net/report-up-for-debate-physicist-says-black-holes-are-a-math-impossibility

report | Up for Debate: physicist says black holes are a math impossibility

Researcher says they might not be exactly what they seem.
April 10, 2019


— the interview —
read | full story
— the story —
A quandary: black holes don’t exist — according to math calculations by physicist Laura Mersini-Houghton PhD — at the University of North Carolina.
Because black holes are traditionally considered one of the biggest cosmic mysteries — Mersini-Houghton’s statement that they don’t exist has caused controversy. But the science behind the scientific theory of black holes is more complex from a math and physics point of view.
Most of us think of black holes as stars that collapse in massive explosions, causing them to become smaller + denser. Mersini-Houghton isn’t questioning the existence of that. But she is questioning what properties black holes have — such as a singularity within a star’s explosion that creates the event horizon. An event horizon is a point so strong that nothing can escape the pull of the black hole: once something goes into a black hole, it disappears.
The 2 leading theories about our  universe contradict this, however. Historic physicist Albert Einstein PhD’s theory of gravity predicts that black holes can form, but his law of quantum theory says that nothing from the universe can ever disappear. Combine the 2 theories creates mathematical nonsense — and is called “the information loss paradox.”
So how can both theories be correct? The only way to combine the 2 concepts is by stating that some properties we associate with black holes don’t exist. That means black holes — as scientists know them, are impossible. Her calculations require scientists to re-imagine the fabric of space, and re-think the origins of our universe.
For many decades, scientists believed that black holes form when a massive star collapses to a single point in space. Imagine planet Earth being squished into a ball the size of a peanut — called a singularity. The event horizon the point where a black hole’s gravitational pull is so strong that nothing can escape it. Crossing this horizon means that you could never cross back.
Experimental evidence may one day show physical proof if black holes exist in the universe or not — and in what form. But for now, Mersini-Houghton says the mathematics are conclusive.
Laura Mersini-Houghton PhD said: “I’m still not over the shock. We’ve been studying this problem for a more than 50 years — and this math solution gives us a lot to think about.”
— the report —
report title: The back-reaction of Hawking radiation on a gravitationally collapsing star — black holes
year: September 2014
author: by Laura Mersini-Houghton PhD
read | the report
format: Adobe
— summary —
In her paper Laura Mersini-Houghton PhD uses 2 seemingly conflicting theories to mathematically prove that black holes don’t exist — because they can’t possibly come into existence in the first place. She also references physicist Stephen Hawking PhD.
on the web | reading
on the web | pages
Univ. of North Carolina | Laura Mersini-Houghton PhD
Cambridge Univ. | Stephen Hawking PhD
Stephen Hawking PhD | home
[ story file ]
story title: report | Up for Debate: physicist says black holes are math impossibility
deck: Researcher says they might not be exactly what they seem.
year: 2019
section: digest
[ end of file ]



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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1504.23 - 10:10

- Days ago = 1389 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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