Eugene Robinson: A glimpse of the power of science to amaze

Washington • Forget everything else for a moment and see the infinite.

On Wednesday, scientists unveiled a blurred image that should dazzle all the spirits of the planet: the very first image of a black hole, a region of space so dense that nothing can escape its appeal, nor even in the light. Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity predicts black holes and their existence stems from the indirect observation of several decades. But we have never seen one so far and the experience is humiliating.

Please me. I have just returned from vacation. Before returning to the frenetic scrum of the news cycle 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, let us pause to reflect on the majesty of the cosmos.

Let's take a moment to marvel at how the universe turns out to be strange and wonderful. Black holes, which are not uncommon – hiding in the center of our own galaxy, the Milky Way – can be seen as portals to another realm that is forever inaccessible. These are places where space and time cease to exist, where the familiar parameters that define our reality lose all meaning.

To see such an object is to look into the ultimate abyss. Stunned fear is the only reasonable answer.

The black hole in question, known as the M87, is at the heart of a distant galaxy, 55 million light-years away, to be a little more precise. The fact that an international team of astrophysicists was able to take his picture reminds us that while many of our institutions have gone astray and have squandered the public's trust, science is still able to do miraculous things.

To see M87, they needed a telescope as big as the Earth itself. To simulate such a thing, they simultaneously trained existing radio telescopes on eight targets around the world, gathering mountains of data – so much so that the files were too large to be sent over the Internet and had to be routed everywhere. large capacity hard drives. Winter observations from a telescope in Antarctica have been delayed until the temperature drops and the discs containing the data can be moved.

All this information was combined and analyzed, a process that took several months. The resulting image was revealed at coordinated press conferences, including one at the National Press Club, led by Shep Doeleman of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Doeleman directed the Event Horizon Telescope project, named after the spherical border that surrounds a black hole and marks the point of no return for anything that is unfortunate enough to get closer.

Computer scientist Katherine Bouman, 29, who will soon become an assistant professor at Caltech, has developed an algorithm to combine the huge amounts of data produced by participating telescopes. Those of us who believe in the power of diversity have predicted that science will benefit greatly from opening its doors to women. We were right.

The biggest contribution, of course, came from Einstein. A century ago, he described gravity not as a force of attraction between the masses (according to Isaac Newton), but as a deformation of space-time. His equations made counterintuitive and even absurd predictions – that the path of light from a distant source would be curved by passing near a massive object, for example, or that time would pass more slowly near to A powerful gravitational field. On all counts, however, it turned out right. The GPS of your cell phone would make you crack in the brick walls if no compensation was taken for the time distortion described by Einstein.

But even Einstein was disturbed when Karl Schwarzschild, another German physicist, used the equations of general relativity to establish that if matter became too dense, it would collapse into a black hole. The idea seemed absurd. But Schwarzschild's calculations turned out to be accurate.

How is it even possible to photograph a black hole in the black of space ink? How do you capture an image of nothing? It turns out that some black holes, including the massive M87, are surrounded by tiny materials that spin quickly like water that flows through a drain. All this material reaches such speeds that it forms a burning disc and shiny – a flamboyant donut around the ravenous hole.

Which is exactly what M87 looks like. Just wow.

Humans are capable of epic bullshit that endangers our very existence. But sometimes, in a way, we always succeed.

(c) 2019, Washington Post Writers Group