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Few people could have predicted that the historic release of the first image of a black hole would turn into a public spectacle of sexist scandal – although this is the time in which we live, where literally every news is shelled by the reactionary.
On April 10, the Horizon Telescope Collaboration Event (EHT) presented the very first direct image of a black hole. The fuzzy composite embodied in two centuries of advances in mathematics, science and electronics. Before this image, only artistic illustrations were available to describe the mysterious singularities that distort the space-time continuum because of their enormous masses, producing a gravitational force such that even light can not escape. Shortly after the ESS presentation, MIT tweeted a picture of Katie Bouman, a 29-year-old computer scientist whose work was crucial to the project, when the first black hole was being processed.
"This is the moment when the first black hole image was processed, in the eyes of researcher Katie Bouman," said Twitter's MIT's largest research lab, the computer and intelligence lab. artificial.
Bouman, an Event Horizon Telescope Postdoctoral Fellow and future Assistant Professor in the California Institute of Technology's Computer Science and Mathematics Department, was thrilled at the photo sitting at his computer, his hands covering his mouth. Photography immediately made her the face of the project – that is why an informal coterie of sexist trolls launched a sexist investigation to invalidate her contributions.
A familiar story is followed. Fake Twitter accounts have been created on his behalf. Men on Twitter has rejected his scientific contributions as mere feminist postures. And there was a debate about whether she deserved a Wikipedia page.
It is hard to imagine that the same answer would have occurred if a white man were in this picture instead of Bouman. Salon contacted Bouman for an interview, but an MIT representative said she was no longer taking interviews with the press.
It is no secret that women are underrepresented in careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). According to 2016 statistics, women make up only 30% of the STEM workforce. Often, their contributions go unnoticed, as the story has shown. For example, when people think of the mission that brought Apollo to the moon, they probably think of astronaut Neil Armstrong, not Margaret Hamilton, who developed the embedded flight software for the Apollo space program. Placing Bouman at the center of discovery may have been a conscious choice of optics for the MIT research laboratory, given that STEM domains are often criticized for their lack of equality between the two. but the public's reactions were almost certainly unexpected.
In the midst of chaos, Bouman wrote in a post on Facebook: "No algorithm or anyone created this image, it needed the incredible talent of a team of scientists from around the world and years of hard work to develop the instrument. , data processing and imaging methods. and the analytical techniques necessary to achieve this seemingly impossible feat. It is truly an honor and I am very lucky to have had the opportunity to work with you all. "
His response was gracious and highlighted the fact that big science projects are being done through collective collaboration. As many have pointed out, his answer highlights the false glorification of the trope of "solitary genius" in STEM, in which a person is responsible for an ingenious creation. (Even Isaac Newton was famous for his discomfort with the way he was treated as a singular hero for contemplating gravitation. "If I've seen further, it's standing on the shoulders of giants," writes in a letter to fellow nature philosopher Robert Hooke.) More than 200 people have been working on the black hole imagery project, and Bouman has drawn public attention to this point. It was not an attempt to divert his credibility or his contributions, but rather to remind people that something as monumental in the scientific world can not happen without a lot of brains. As Bouman described in her TED Talk 2016, she likened herself to an artist in judicial sketching, but instead created an algorithm to image a mystery of the universe.
Yet, the worst thing about this saga is that it can arouse fear among young women who wish to pursue a career in STEM. The message of Bouman's reaction is that if you are a woman who becomes the face of a massive scientific breakthrough, sexist trolls on the Internet will spend far too much of their time harassing you and trying to refute your credibility.
Women are often harassed on various social media platforms – especially in professions such as journalism and politics, where they are in the public eye. The way we are going forward is not clear, as such abusive incidents are likely to inspire many people to stop using social media platforms altogether, at the Kelly Marie Tran.
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