Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Harvard Physicist Describes the Inside of a Black Hole | Shep Doeleman ​(#217)

Episode Date: March 10, 2022

Sheperd S. Doeleman is an Astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian and Founding Director of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a synchronized global array of radio observatories designed to examine the nature of black holes. He is also a Harvard Senior Research Fellow and a Project Co-Leader of Harvard’s recently established Black Hole Initiative (BHI). The BHI is a first-of-its-kind interdisciplinary program at the University that brings together the disciplines of Astronomy, Physics, Mathematics, Philosophy, and History of Science to define and establish black hole science as a new field of study. As one of the founding members of the BHI, Doeleman leads a team studying supermassive black holes with sufficient resolution to directly observe the event horizon itself. Using Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) methods, the EHT telescope networks observe astronomical radio sources at 1.3 millimeter (mm) wavelengths. These sources include the supermassive black holes at the centers of our own Milky Way, called Sagittarius A* (SgrA*), as well as in Messier 87 (M87), the supergiant elliptical galaxy in the constellation Virgo. Doeleman is a Guggenheim Fellow (2012) and was the recipient of the DAAD German Academic Exchange grant for research at the Max Planck Institute für Radioastonomie. He serves as a peer reviewer for the Astrophysical Journal, Science, and Nature, among others. Doeleman leads and co-leads research programs supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) ALMA-NA Development Fund, the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, the MIT International Science & Technology Initiatives (MISTI), the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and the John Templeton Foundation. He has taught at MIT and mentors students and post-doctoral fellows at MIT and Harvard. Please Visit our Sponsors: LinkedIn: LinkedIn.com/impossible to post a job for FREE Athletic Greens, makers of AG1 which I take every day. Get an exclusive offer when you visit https://athleticgreens.com/impossible AG1 is made from the highest quality ingredients, in accordance with the strictest standards and obsessively improved based on the latest science. All 33 Chairs. My All33 Chair is the ideal chair for all of us ‘knowledge workers’ suffering through unending Zoom calls. Sitting still is bad for you. All33 chairs are my choice because they allow your pelvis to move the way it does while you walk — so all 33 vertebrae align into perfect posture. The result? Better breathing, better blood flow, and relief from pain. It’s crazy what you can do when you set your body to it. To get $100 off your order, visit https://all33.com/impossible Search for The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you listen to podcasts, or go to jordanharbinger.com/subscribe Please join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php  Produced by Stuart Volkow (P.G.A) and Brian Keating Edited by Stuart Volkow Music:  Yeti Tears Miguel Tully - www.facebook.com/yetitears/ Theo Ryan - http://the-omusic.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I want to make a test of the fundamental theories of the universe. You want to go to the most extreme laboratories in the universe. And a black hole is that. A black hole is the most mysterious object in the universe. It's when matter gets to be in such a small space, and it's so dense that the force of gravity prevents even light from escaping. That's a one-way door from our universe. My friends, welcome to another special episode of the Into the Impossible podcast, featuring a

renowned scientist, Dr. Shep Dolman of Harvard University, the founding director of the Event Horizon Telescope that released some of the most iconic images ever captured in science history. And I claim maybe in human history because it really took the global village of intellects, minds, of money, collaboration around the world. And today, Shep and I geeked out about what are these images based upon? What's the technology that goes into them? And more than just the human drama that we do discuss, what is the technology, technological drama? What would Einstein say seeing such things?

And so we went off a very deep dive into the technology, which I know that you, my audience, the most astute, astoundingly intellectual minds in the multiverse will appreciate more than almost any other person on Earth. So please do share it also with your friends and family who may be interested as well. And we also did talk about some of the controversy, some of the surprising things, ranging from how do you lead a collaboration? How do you avoid toxicity? How do you handle things like sexism and some repugnant behavior that took place around the world when these first images shocked and shook up the universe? Where do we go from here in technological space? But also, how do we convey to the next generation of scientists? How best to really work together, cooperate,

and learn using these teachable moments, such as those that we elucidate in this talk. It was really a phenomenal conversation, so much fun. I think it's his first podcast that he's ever done. And we went deep, we went broad, and we culminated with the thrilling three final questions that you'll have to subscribe to the podcast to view. So you can do that on YouTube. But I also ask you to do so on my website, Brian Keating.com, and subscribe to my Monday Magic musing messages where I send out five details.

My message contains the, in the spirit of Arthur C. Clarke. who said any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable for magic. I send out a magic message, which involves a memory, an appearance that I've been a part of, an image, and you can guess what the image will be this week with this event horizon. Telescope is my conversation, which is the sea, and also something that is really near and dear, sort of a blurb, something inspirational I share with my readers. I send it out twice a month, no big deal. Cancel any time, your money back, zero.

But I do request that you sign up and then you've got access to the thrilling three questions. And you won't want to miss it because Shep was incredibly vulnerable and just open, authentic and honest. So I think you'll enjoy this episode of The Into the Impossible podcast with Dr. Shep Dolman, the eye of the next generation event horizon telescope. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the bobby doors, please, hell. Something upbeat to begin, one of my beginning interviews of 2022 with a phenomenal scientist, a pioneer in the field of imaging black holes. And doing so from literally the entire surface of the Earth, from the South Pole to the Chileanauticama Desert, to everywhere else in between.

And that's Dr. Sheptholman of Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, joining us all the way. from beautiful downtown Cambridge is Dr. Dolman. And how are you today, sir? I'm well. Thank you very much, Brian. Good to be here. You are the founding director of the Event Horizon Telescope, EHT. You are the principal investigator of the NGEHT, the next generation EHT, and your senior research fellow at Harvard University. And I thought that we'd start, you know, normally, Shep, I have on authors, and I ask them, like, how'd you come up with this stupid title and name for your stupid new book, like this one over here. I have this author on.

This author is always on, you know, where'd you come up with this dumb idea, this dumb cover title? That's my book. But you don't have a book yet, although I'm curious if there's something in the works maybe, like your colleague Haino, Falco, who was on the show earlier in 2021. But since you don't have a book, I want to start off with what you do. And I want to ask you the question that I ask my colleagues, study black holes. And it is what fascinates you the most about black holes? Well, black holes play in a lot of different arenas. Mathematicians love them, physicists, love them. Even philosophers

get all, you know, dewy-eyed about black holes and sort of astronomers. The thing that fascinates me most about them is that it seems as though they are the most efficient engines for changing the universe. So when you look at the night sky, it looks the way it does because black holes exist. And we know so little about them. So my whole career has been trying to figure out what are they, how can we make images of them, and how do we learn more about them? And where did the idea of the event horizon telescope come from? You know, I get that question a lot. And it's one of those interesting projects where it has a lot of different tributaries all coming together.

So you've got Einstein thinking about black holes, Schwartzschild solving this equation in the trenches of World War I, coming up with this idea of a Schwarzschild radius, the point of which nothing can escape from a gravitationally bound, very compact object. And then this realization from the observational point that there are probably black holes in the centers of most galaxies, which came from radio astronomy in the 60s.

And then in the 70s, something very interesting happened. People began to simulate what a black hole might look like if it were at the center of a galaxy or being fed by a star. And there were some really interesting simulations by a French astronomer named Jean-Pier-Luminé, and he was credited with the first simulation that showed what a black hole might look like, called the twisty lensing that happens right near the event horizon. And at the same time, people were using radio interferometry, my game, and looking at very high angular resolution images,

and they were realizing that there were very compact objects in the center of galaxies, those were probably black holes. Now we had this theory of what they might look like. We had this idea that they existed. And probably around, in the mid-nid, 90s, we began to really focus on Sagittarius A-Star, the center of our Milky Way galaxy, where we think there's a 4 million solar mass black hole. And then there were some high-nosed work, for example, that showed what the shadow of the black hole might look like an extension of

Jean-Pierre's work. And then we began to realize through this idea of massive digital signal processing, harnessing Moore's law to make a new kind of. of telescope that this was really possible. And we wrote a paper for the Decatal Review in the for the US Decatal Review every 10 years all the astronomers come together and they say what's new? What are we going to do next? And we wrote a paper there and said, this is the decade. We will image a black hole by the end of this decade. And we made it with three months to spare. So the origin story is that theory, observation all came together around the mid-90s, in the 2000s, it became possible.

I believe we were all sitting around a table at the American Astronomical Society meeting in 2009, and said, event horizon telescope, catchy. And then we were off and running. Yeah, it's funny that people point out, you know, technology has, you know, been around for several decades, you know, in one form or another since Jansky in the 1930s at Bell Labs. but the application and the confluence of it with digital computer processing, correlators, et cetera, make it really come to fruition at this specific moment in time and perhaps know earlier. And I wonder if you can talk a little bit about the technology.

My audience is the most astute technological collection of 56,000 people now growing that you'll ever find. So don't be afraid to geek out a little bit. How do these instruments work together as a telescope? Because it's not called the Event Horizon Telescope. It's called the telescope, meaning it's a singular telescope. What sense is it a singular telescope? Well, since there's a few different things that come together to make this all possible. And it's really a question of why now, right?

Because this was the moment when you could really pull this off. So in the late, in the mid-90s, people had made radio interferometric detections of a black hole, right? They peered into the center of our multi-way galaxy and they'd seen something there. But we didn't have the sensitivity to make an image. And so what we really needed was an explosion and bandwidth. We needed to be able to record a hundred times more data than we had been recording before to make these images. And so we did this by a concerted effort to harness Moore's law and we reimagined all of the instrumentation that had been used in the past, brought it into the digital age, and that is what made this possible. Now, what do you do with those recorders?

So the way that very long baseline interferometry works, this is the technique that we use to turn the Earth into a telescope, is we point all of our telescopes in the ray. Every telescope on the Earth is swivels to look at the black hole at exactly the same time. We synchronize them all with GPS. They all know exactly what time it is. At each station, we have atomic clocks, so the ticking is so precise that when waves come from the black hole, they can be synchronized perfectly into a plane.

And we can then start to process these data. We record at each of these sites on high bandwidth recorders, like 64 gigabits per second, all the data coming from the black hole, and then we close up shop. Then we're done. except that we're not done. We've just begun, right?

So then all of that data is set back on hard disk drives to a central supercomputer where they're played back. And all of the data are played back in just the right way so that we act as though we've had a parabolic dish, the size of the earth. So all the plane waves coming from the black hole hit this virtual parabola. All the delays are encoded in digital electronics. and we wind up comparing the data that we record in Chile, with the data we record in Spain,

with the data we record in Hawaii, and we create a telescope as large as the surface of the Earth, in much the same way that an optical dish bounces light off of its surface and comes to a focus. That's where you put your camera. We do the same thing but in digital electronics. And the technology synthesizes this enormous telescope. And I wonder, you know, we're kind of presaging some of the audience questions that we're going to get to.

But one of them is, you know, relatively astute. And it's kind of focuses, no pun intended, on this aspect of, you know, baseline, which is the maximum separation versus the aperture of each individual dish. And they're wondering this viewer is wondering, you know, what if you just had one tiny little, you know, put a dish TV sized dish, but you put it at L2 where the web telescope is, you know, careful so they don't bump into each other. It's getting crowded out there with plank, WMAP, and now the web telescope. But tell me, would you benefit more from one more telescope like that, or would you benefit more from a South Pole-sized telescope or an Alma-sized telescope at the North Pole? Where would you start to benefit more? Is it the bigger is better, or is it that farther is better?

So there's a lot to learn about black holes. And as you can imagine, the kind of telescope you employ gives you a, better look at some science and then a different kind of telescope would give you a good look at other scientific areas of inquiry so if you were to put a telescope at l2 that's a great question by the way fabulous question told you my audience is the best and brightest in the multiverse this this is an astute crowd so you would wind up getting an angular resolution that was a fraction of a microarch sector right so this is the equivalent of seeing like a human hair on the moon i mean this is really kind of tiny stuff, or maybe a BD on the moon.

I forget exactly what the analogy would be. But it's about, it would be, you know, many times fine or angle of resolution that even the event horizon telescope can do. And the problem with that is that you would need to have a pretty big telescope out there to get the sensitivity that you needed to look at the very fine structures, because then you're only sensitive to the tiniest structures on the sky. Now, thankfully, we now know that the ring of light around the black hole, the shadow, consists of multiple concentric rings, each more fine than the previous one.

So what you could do by going out to L2 is start to look at the very fine, almost fractal structure of this ring, which is formed by multiple orbits of light around the black hole. That blows my mind, actually. That light is trapped to travel in circles around a black hole, and we might see that with such a telescope at all too. Now, if you put a telescope at the North Pole, or you add telescopes on the ground, then you'd probably be able to make a much richer image

of the black holes that we already can see, Sagittarius A-Star M-87, and that would show us the flow of material around the black hole. We've learned a lot about accretion. So L2, we learn about GR, general relativity, makes Einstein happy. And if you had more sites on the earth, we'd learn a lot more about accretion. So you'd make a lot of astrophysicists happy because then they'd learn why black holes shine. It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speeds. That's why I chose GoogleFi wireless. My connection

stay strong even when the hive is buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans started $35 a month. Now, that's a deal that doesn't stay. Explore GoogleFi Wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees. GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Right. So it's kind of you'd win in all cases. And maybe it'd be controversial. If you were a director of NASA for the 2020 decadal survey, I mean, would you prioritize? I mean, the James Webb Telescope cost $10 billion, which is equivalent to the LHC, and they launched it into space, and it's going to do wonderful things, I'm sure. But that kind of swallowed up a huge portion of astrophysics general budget for the future and doesn't leave a lot of room for the budget of the LHT, which I think is

much, much smaller. And I wonder, you know, if you can, you know, comment on that. In other words, when do you decide, you know, that the scientific reach of an instrument justifies maybe even, you know, superseding a new way of looking at the universe, let's call Web New, even though it's, you know, they share some things with SIRIF and other previous existing experiments. But anyway, how would you as a policymaker prioritize doing upgrades to EHT if you weren't, you know, that had a vested interest in it? Yeah. Well, so let me put it this way. I told you before that in 2010, we submitted a paper to the 2010 Decatur Review. And we said, this is what we'd like to do.

We think we can image a black hole by the end of the decade. I didn't tell you the end of that story. The end of that story is that we didn't make it into the Decatural Review. The Event Horizon Telescope did not appear in the Decadal Report. They did not think it was worthy. But then here we are in 2019 coming with the first image of a black hole. So the Decatur Review and the consensus of all. all the astronomers of repute taken together is not always, in my view, the right one.

Because they overlook the long shots. They overlook the innovation. They overlook the high risk, high payoff. They want to know what the entire community can get behind with 100% chance of success in the long run. And the EHT was risky. We needed champions. We needed happy warriors. We needed people who were going to risk careers in order to make.

make that happen. And that's not what the Decatur reviews about. Now that we know that black hole shadows exist, now I would prioritize it much more prominently in that report. And we did get fairly good mention in the Astro 2020 report. But again, if I was the NASA head, I would say full steam ahead. Let's put something in space to create a virtual telescope larger than our planet. And we're going to get to N-G-E-H-T later, but I do want to ask, you know, you're very cautious and circumspect, and I respect that and appreciate that. You're talking a lot about the light shadow and these concentric rings. You're less referring to it as the event horizon, imaging the event horizon. Talk about, is that just a distinction without a difference ship, or is it, you know, just you sometimes will call these two equivalent things the same?

Well, so this is a really interesting point. I mean, if you talk to a physicist about what an event horizon is, they'll have a slightly different view than an astronomer. So an astronomer is looking for some kind of phenomenological membrane. You know, so where do you not see any light? Where do you get this infinite red shift? And where can you see light bending around? A physicist will think about it in terms of the information paradox.

and conformal field theory. So your definition of the event horizon, and more importantly, your definition of when you've seen it will change depending upon your perspective. So from our perspective as astronomers, we see this ring of light, and we realize that this is the manifestation of all of the simulations we've ever run.

So our best physics, our best understanding of GR, all show this feature, is an event horizon. So we're happy, we're comfortable in that space. We're comfortable saying, we've seen something that we think is the smoking gun for an event horizon. Now, other people will say, well, have you really seen an actual event horizon? Have you seen matter disappear from our consciousness, our sensory apparatus forever? We haven't done that. And even more to the point, people look at this ring and they say, well, have you really seen the

the photon orbit, right, which is a slightly different thing than seeing a ring of emission around the black hole. And there we think that new instruments will corroborate our finding that this is the event horizon of a black hole. Next generation, as you said, it's going to be a new instrument that will do that. But you'd have to do some pretty interesting gymnastics to get it out from the fact that this marks an event horizon. But I'm perfectly willing to admit there are non-GR space times. There are potentially non-black hole solutions, but they tend to be extremely exotic, Brian. Right. And for reference, we're talking about the portraits that is framed above your right shoulder

in the background of your office living room, wherever you may happen to be. Many people, some of my listeners have as their avatar, that picture, on Facebook for Facebook groups. It's really an iconic image. and it was one of the few, you know, really positive things to come out during the pandemic time, kind of united the world in an awful lot of celebratory, non-political, non-biological pandemic-related news that showed what the human species is capable of. One of my colleagues, Lake Great Hottons Parr, who was a professor here, was a student of Leon Letterman at Columbia, I used to say that GR was the culmination of all of Western civilization.

And I said, well, what do you mean? Hans, you know, what does that mean? Say, well, you know, think about what it takes to get GR to work. You needed to have language, mathematics. You needed to have, you know, conversations, culture, robust consensus. You needed to have arguments and have detractors and so forth. Then you need to publicize it, disseminate, get funding for it, political. It spans every dimension of, you know, of human interaction.

So it's rightfully seen as an appropriation of our culture. And in fact, Einstein himself said, you know, when he was at, asked, you know, is he, you know, how does he view himself compared to other scientists? He said that he paled, and this is, you know, a little sock puppet I have of him. And he, he said, I pale in comparison to Isaac Newton, who did even more for civilization than I did. Now, this was a human project, more than almost anything else. And before we get to the human, you know, interest aspects of it, I do want to talk about the challenges technological, the one that I'm most familiar with, although, you know, I have, you know,

participated in robust discussion about EHT, but the South Pole Telescope. So just today, I notice you do have a Twitter account, which is kind of cool to see. So I'll put a link to that in the graphics. So I'm my super producer, Stuart, do that. But I want to ask, that telescope today, just tweeted out that they are installing a new tertiary mirror.

Talk about the importance of the South Pole. It has a huge kind of soft spot in my heart. I do love this. So I don't like the South Pole as much as I like Antarctica, McMurdo, et cetera, which is much more pleasant to visit. But I've spent some time at the South Pole. You have two, right? And talk about what the importance of that particular instrument is.

I mean, as George Orwell said, all telescope baselines are important, but some are more equal than others, right? So talk about the South Pole telescope. Why do they upgrade the tertiary? My friend John Karlstrom, who's a Titanic figure, you know, in all of astrophysics, he's made so many discoveries. Why did he dedicate this cosmology telescope studying what I think is the most important thing,

the CMB over my shoulder? Why is the South Pole Telescope so important to this mission of EHT? Well, so first of all, the South Pole Telescope is important, but it's really a case where all the telescopes are important because in very long baseline,

interferometry, it's location, location, location. It's just like real estate. And having many telescopes all around the globe is quite important. Now, the South Pole telescope has a few attributes that make it quite attractive. So, first of all, it's the best observing location just about on the surface of the planet for what we do.

I mean, at a wavelength of 1 millimeter, wavelength of 0.87 millimeters, you routinely get unparalleled long periods of excellent viewing and excellent weather. So that's one thing. And the second thing is that for one of our sources, the galactic center of the Milky Way, where there's a four million solar mass black hole, it's at 30 degrees minus 30 degrees declination, so it just circles in the sky.

So you always are able to see that source. So no matter what other telescope can see Sagittarius A-star on the rest of the globe, it always has a partner with the South Pole. So the South Pole is everyone's friend from that perspective. And it gives you a very long north-south baseline. So as you can imagine, civilization kind of exists in this band around the Earth. And we really prize the north-south sites, which can stretch our resolution, which can give us spatial understanding of what's on the sky in different dimensions.

So we really like the fact that we have a telescope now in Greenland and now also one in the South Pole. And what I think is interesting, you mentioned John Carlstrom and the CMB. The fact that the South Pole has agreed to work with us as part of the Event Horizon Telescope just shows that you can have one cutting-edge application for a telescope in this great location. And then you can timeshare, you can deliver even more science by just a few changes, this tertiary mirror, a new receiver. That can give you a whole new dimension of science from that same location. So I love this idea of reusing what we already have.

I'm a very thrifty kind of person at heart. And I just love reusing things that we have to do new things. Right. Yes. Parsimony is the friend of all astronomers. So the new tertiary and the new secondary, I forgot. I'm just looking up Amman Chuck Shee's tweet. He's down at the South Pole.

I think he's their winner over for the upcoming Austral Winter. He tweeted out the new. a picture of those too. I'll put those in the show notes or in the B-roll footage. So why, what did it need a new one? I mean, what couldn't it do with the existing secondary and tertiary? Were those just not optimized for this, you know, to provide the highest resolution images? Or is it necessary to do what we're going to get to in a minute to look deeper at Saturday Star, for example? So I'm not an expert on the South Pole telescope. I'm the wrong person to give you the lowdown

and the inner scoop on that. The secondary, I imagine, is being redone because they just want better acuity and better optics and better throughput for their telescope. They want to always put new instruments down there for the cosmic microwave background. The tertiary mirror, I think, is interesting for the EHT because it may lead to a mode where we can quickly switch

between what the South Pole normally does and the EHT, because the South Pole normally, uses a ballometer array, which is not suitable for the work that we do with the event horizon telescope, and we need to switch to a different kind of receiver. It used to be that you'd have to go out in the austral winter, in your minus 50 degrees to bolt a new mirror onto the South Pole telescope in order to do the EHT work. And I think this is going to lead to a much, much easier process for switching from one to the other. Excellent. So let's turn to the next, to the next, topic, which is the difference between the different kinds of black holes that you can image.

They're all supermassive, right? You're not imaging, you know, the same types of black holes that say LIGO has detected. And yet they're very complimentary. Obviously, they're very important. First of all, you know, there is a misconception that our galaxy, you know, is somehow orbiting around our Sajah star that it's responsible for our, is that correct? The supermassive black hole at the center of Milky Way called Sajah Star is the central mass that keeps our galaxy in orbit. Oh, yeah. So even though it is at pretty much the dynamical center of our galaxy, it's because it's settled there. The mass of the supermassive black hole in the Milky Way galaxy is a tiny fraction of the entire mass of the whole galaxy. I mean, our whole galaxy might have 10 to the

11 stars or something like that. And Sajahe Star is maybe 4 million. stars. So it's a very, very small fraction of the total mass of our galaxy. Right. And indeed, it's also black holes make up, unfortunately, a minuscule amount of dark matter or invisible matter, as I understand it. And yet there is hope both for, you know, detecting the similar kinds of patterns and so forth that you detected in M87 and the iconic image behind you, but also for Sajahe star. So can you talk about, you know, presuming that is going to come out someday, in chronologically speaking, it will have to be after M87 was detected, if it ever does come out. Can you talk about what made the choice of, was there

a choice to prioritize one versus the other, some, you know, the closer one versus a more massive one? How did that, if optimization program work on a technical level, as I'm continuing to, you know, to hammer home, the audience is really keen to hear about what scientists are actually thinking to make these breakthroughs, not just the pretty pictures that result of them. Yeah, it's a great question, Brian. So for a long time, Sagittarius A Star was thought to be our primary target. There was incontroversible evidence that there was something there. And of course, last year, Reinhard Gensel and Andrea Gez won the Nobel Prize for their work,

nailing down the fact that there was a very, very massive object in the center of our galaxy, almost certainly a black hole. So we knew what its mass was. we knew its location, it became the fixation for astronomers across many, many different wave bands. Yours truly included as well as a lot of my colleagues. But then around 2010, I mean, 2010, 2009, we realized that there might be some other opportunities for imaging this light bending around an event horizon that causes the shadow. And in fact, if you go back to Jean-Pier-Luminé's 1979 paper, he has a wonderful sentence in there. And he says, this may be the kind of thing you

would see at the heart of M87. So even in 1979, I think he was the first person to say, maybe this will happen for M87. So in 2009, we made observations of M87 and we detected it. And then we published in 2012 the evidence that there was something really compact there, equally as compact in terms of the Schwarzschar radius scale as what we had seen in the center of our own galaxy. Now we had two sources to look at. Yeah. So it's huge. I mean, you're doubling your target base, right? And then there's something very interesting comes into play then because M87 is about a thousand times more massive than Sagittary Sastar. And the dynamical time scale, let's geek out for a minute, Brian, that the orbital period around a black hole

is directly proportional to its mass. So for Sagittary-Star, things move around the black hole in half an hour. So imagine that. You're looking at this black hole during an evening, and you want to add all your data together as the Earth rotates. And you can't do it because what you're trying to look at changes its appearance from moment to moment. It's like taking a picture of a runner sprinting by, taking the lens cap off your camera, you get a blur. So to do that, you have to make a movie of what you're seeing. So it requires a lot more data, a lot more finesse, a lot more algorithmic work, frankly. But for M87, it's so massive that it doesn't change for a whole week.

For a whole week, it might stay roughly the same shape and morphology. It's like the Buddha. It's like sitting there, just not moving, very, very still. It's like the boot there. It's like Homer Simpson. I say it looks like a donut. Homer Simpson's taken a bite out of it. Well, M87 has given rise to a lot of memes. Let's put it that way. But it's just sitting there and while the earth rotates, it waits for its picture to be taken. So all the data from a night of observing can be added together and you get a lot of data to make a great image. So that's why we went and came with the M87 image first because it was easier. Because when we put together all the data for M86, it was so clear that we had a ironclad result, a result that was really clear and true. For M87, we started analyzing the data at the same time,

but it rapidly became apparent to us that it was more complicated. And that's why we're continuing to work with those data now. I'm fairly certain that soon we will have some results on Sagittarius A Star, but it's taken a long time because we had to develop a lot of the analysis. techniques to deal with the fact that it was changing. Yeah, and that brings up another technical question, but the advances in numerical relativity and prediction. I remember seeing some of those plots from the 70s, you know, is like hand-drawn in pencil

or it was on a dot matrix printer, and they're really quite beautiful, and they look exactly like, you know, some of the reprocessed images that I've seen. To what extent is the image behind you? You know, I often hear this, because I've gotten into the person that reintrodu, we've known, you and I have known each other for a little bit, but it took our friend, mutual friend Avi Loeb, who's somewhere nearby your office there at CFA or at Harvard, and he reintroduced us together.

And then that led to this interview. So we have Avi Loeb, you know, he's a great matchmaker. So when Avi was on last summer, a couple times on The Into the Impossible podcast, we talked a lot about aliens and detection and so forth. of UAP phenomena, of course, Omuamua, which now that I am an external advisor on the Galileo project, I have received my own sample of Omuamua. So Avi gave me a piece of Omuamua. No, I'm just kidding.

This is just a meteorite. But these objects, you know, coursing across the sky. And then that brought up in the public's mind, especially when the Pentagon released these data over the summer and this kind of bland position report about it. It could be what's worth studying. people start saying, we want the data. We want data from these astronomers. And my point is fine, but you have to treat it the way that we treat our data. In other words, you have to say all the things that go into the image that could be artifacts,

that could be biases, that could be relics and remnants of unwanted signals. And I pointed like the Hubble Deepfield. I like to be provocative. I say the Hubble Deep field is not data. It's an image. And yes, there's some data. You can count how many galaxies there are. You can make an estimate how many galaxies are in the universe. You can see how many of them are red, how many are elliptical. You could do some analysis, but it's not the same as the raw data, right? So that's the raw data.

Now, what is an amateur going to do with that or a non-expert amateur? I mean, amateurs do a lot in astronomy, as you know, but someone who knows nothing about data processing, very little. So the question after that rambling preamble is, you know, the image behind you, to what extent is that data? Or is it merely, and there's nothing wrong with it, is it merely sort of a pretty picture? In other words, do you analyze that or do you actually have to go deep? And if so, how do you go deeper to extract GR and numerical comparisons to numerical GR? Have you ever rearranged your furniture and discovered the carpet underneath looks brand new, while the rest of it looks, well, not so new? It's time for a carpet upgrade. At the Home Depot,

we have stylish choices at simple prices from all the top brands. Best of all, we can install it for you, starting at only 49 cents per square foot. So all you have to do is pick your perfect floor. Start your carpet project today at the Home Depot, how doers get more done. Exclusions apply for licenses. See Homedeeper.com slash license numbers. Yeah, it's a really good question. First, I want to tackle the data question because we're only as good as our data. And we have to create an ironclad chain of custody, if you will, all the way from the telescope, you know, with these hardest drives to the correlator, to the astronomers doing the analysis, and then to the image. And we have to explain every step very, very carefully. The first thing I'll say,

is that we had duplication every step of the way. We never had one person. We never had one group. We never had one software package that was responsible for something that we didn't understand or couldn't compare to something else. So you just think about the data pipelines. We had three different independent pipelines handling the data, and they all had to give the same result.

We had two separate correlators, one in Germany and one at MIT, processing the raw data into these interfermetric data set that we imaged. And then we have three different imaging softwares. We had a very historical, traditional one called Clean, which was developed in the 70s, the astronomers. No one loved. We could all warm and runny when we think about clean. But then we developed two new lines of imaging software that were tailor-made for the E.HT,

and we intercompared them all. And then we also looked at different. simulations. We didn't trust one simulation of what we were supposed to be seeing. We used many different simulation packages and we cross-referenced all of them. So every step of the way we had what I like to call a creative tension. It was creative because we were doing something new and we were comparing with each other, but also it was verification. You had to show that what you were getting was consistent with what somebody else was getting across the whole project. So your listeners should be very confident that we treated the data and its analysis very carefully every step of the way.

Now, then there's this question that you raised, which is, what is this above my right shoulder? Like, what is that? So we approach this in a couple of different ways. We modeled it. So we said, what is the best fit model to this? And the models that we used were different kinds of rings or we used doubles. We used many different kinds of modeling techniques. And I can assure you that of all of them, the shadow model, this like concentric crescent,

is by far and away the most probable. So in models, you always look for the most probable. And then we used imaging techniques, like three as I described to you, and all of them gave this particular image, which is in some sense of best fit image. I mean, there are some images that also fit, but this is the general form of all of the images that fit well. And the last point is that we didn't trust ourselves. I mean, there's human drama that comes into any kind of endeavor like this, right? So we divided ourselves into four separate teams, all of whom had the data, but we couldn't talk to each other.

And every group had to analyze the data completely independently, so there was no bias. So there wasn't group think. Everyone got in the room and said, we're all seeing a shadow. of course we're seeing a shadow. Why wouldn't we see a shadow? Of course, yes. Each group found the shadow independently. And then we also tried to make it go away. So we tried to fit it with doubles. We tried to fill it with a filled disk without the shadow dimple inside of it. We did everything we could and the data always steered us back to this image. And it was really the fit to the data, as you said, Brian, that is the ultimate corner. of the realm. And that is what we used to convince ourselves if this shadow was real. And I think that follows perfectly, you know, Feynman's dictum, which is, you know, the first

principle is that you should not fool yourself. The second principle is you're the easiest person to fool. And I always add the third principle is you must not fool Richard Feynman, because that's just cruel. But doing this and doing these blind analyses and doing these multiple analyses. It's kind of an example of what the military calls a red team approach. We've got adversaries who hopefully are loving each other share the same mission. They want to defeat the enemy or protect the country. But they have radically different approaches. Some think we should have a Navy only. Some say we should have only an Air Force, whatever. But taking this approach, adversaries that combat with love, I think that's incredibly important. Before we get into the

the softer science aspects, as you talked about in the collaboration, the social science aspects. I do just want to close out some of the technical commentary, and that is, you mentioned several times a correlator. Now, I've used correlators in radio astronomical applications, you know, my whole career, such as it is, but these correlators are very different in that, as I understand, they're effectively like a home-brew supercomputer in some sense. So can you talk about what is a correlator and you mentioned you have two of them, why is it necessary to have two of them, but not two South Pole telescopes or two Alma-Dish?

Although, yes, of course, you have multiple telescopes, but why is the correlator itself so important and crucial that you actually need two of them? Right, right. It's a good point. So I want to back up a little bit, this technique that we use to make this Event Horizon Telescope. There's a little magic to it,

But essentially what we're doing is we're taking data from a network of radio dishes across the globe, all of whom we're looking at the black hole at the same time. Now, if we had an optical dish looking at the black hole, light from the black hole would hit all the different points on this dish, and the shape of the dish would focus it all to one point, and that's where you would put your camera. We talked about this a little bit before. With VLBI, we have telescopes all over the world.

we record the data as it comes in, time tag it with atomic clocks at each location, so we know exactly when each trough and crest of these waves are recorded on the hard disks. Then we have to compare them. We have to bring them all back to a virtual focus. So we have to take the data we recorded in Chile and combine it with the data we recorded in Spain, for example, in the same way that the optical dish bounces the light so it arrives at exactly the same moment at the focus. So what the correlator does is it plays back these recordings

and delays or advances them perfectly in time to account for the shape of the Earth and relativity and things like this. So they come together at this virtual focus, and they basically just multiply and add the data together. So they combine it just the way the light be combined and focus upon these optical dishes. And then every baseline pair, every pair of telescopes gives you one,

essentially one pixel of the image that you're trying to develop. So the correlator does play a critical role. It combines all the data after the fact from across the Event Horizon Telescope array, and it winds up giving us baseline pair data that we then use to make the image behind them. Now, why do we need two of them? The reason we have two of them is because two exist, but it allows us to send half the data to one, and half the data

data to the other. And then we cross-fertilized. We send a little bit of the same data between each of the correlators to make sure they're giving the exact same results, and one more test that we land. And then we combine the data from the two correlators to make this image. Excellent. So now let's turn a little bit more towards the theoretical aspects of black holes, which be witch and bemuse millions around the globe. And two things are most prominent that I talk about on this channel, at least, with guests ranging from Sir Roger Penrose, to Reinhardt Gensel, and to theorists from Frank Wilczek, to people like Martin Rees. And that is two different notions.

One, black hole singularities and the question of quantum gravity. And the other one is the black hole information paradox, which I talked a lot about with Lenny Suskin. So let's first talk about this. Now, you're an experimentalist. You're not creating new theories, and you're just. doing observations, you're not responsible for also coming up with new theories of relativity or new ways to interpret it. But just, you know, person to person, human to human, when you think about the existence of singularities, do you believe singularities are real? If so, you know,

can we understand them better through the event horizon telescope? And if not real, I'd ask you to speculate on the prospects for quantum gravity to unify quantum mechanics and gravity. So whichever way you choose, it'll lead us down a world line of interesting import to my audience. Yeah. So let me just say as a disclaimer, I'm not a theoretical physicist, so I don't usually study. You know. Some of my best friends are. Some of my best friends are, though. I know. You can date my daughter. I let them date my daughter. It's okay. And they make for a good cocktail party guests. So, but that being said, black holes are fascinating. I mean,

And as far as we know, a singularity does form at the center of the black hole shielded, of course, because of the cosmic censorship conjecture from our view. And this is, of course, some of the best evidence that we have that we don't really know everything. I mean, this is where gravity and quantum mechanics really have to combine at that singularity. So what happens inside the event horizon is of great interest of mathematicians and physicists. and the mystery of the information paradox. Now, at the level of the event horizon, I tend to think that that's a classical region. So, for example, the M87 event horizon,

you and I, if we fell through that, we wouldn't even know we had fallen through it. The curvature of space time is so low that we would just kind of pass right through it. We wouldn't even know that we were no longer visible to the rest of the universe. You don't need quantum mechanics to really understand what happens there. I mean, we're still eating our cheeseburgers or whatever we're doing as we fall through that of the end horizon.

Now, for a solar mass black hole or a few solar masses, it's much different. There you spigotify pretty quickly because the tidal forces are such that your feet are ripped off your body and hilarity ensues, as they say. But so one of the questions that you ask is, can the EHT say something about quantum gravity? Can we learn something about the singularity? And then my first answer is kind of no, that we're in this range where our sensory apparatus that we've built with this Earth-sized telescope can only look at this classical construct that shields the inner complexity of the black. But there are some ideas that the quantum mechanical states of the black hole could leak out. They could tunnel across the event horizon. And you might wind up seeing a horizon scale manifestation of those quantum states.

And there have been some papers published, and I pay close attention to these papers, where they say, if there are some elements of the interior of the black hole that line up perfectly, you could wind up with changes in the shadow shape or changes in the temporal behavior of the shadow. And that would be kind of interesting to look for. I'm not sure how probable it is that we'll see something like that, but you never say never where black holes are concerned. And then there's the other...

You didn't mention this, but I'll mention it with your permission. That we might not be looking at a black hole. I mean, there is the possibility that we're looking at, you know, a black hole mimic, you know, like some kind of a gravistar or some kind of boson star. Now, I view these as highly non-probable. I mean, they're very exotic constructs. I mean, I know how to make a black hole kind of this matter falling in on itself.

I don't know how to make a boson star. I don't know how to make some of these other exotic things. and there are some people in our collaboration who think about how you could tell the difference between these. And there's some very interesting work going on there too. So the fundamental nature of these objects is front and center. Yeah, I mean, I pointed that out when I spoke to Reinhardt earlier this year, you know, that the citation the Nobel Committee gave, it didn't say for imaging the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. It said imaging a compact object of using it as a laboratory for testing GR, which at its core it is, as is M87, whatever you've

seen, the preponderance of it, you can never say never, but the preponderance of evidence seems to suggest it is a black hole. And yet, you know, to call it a compact object is eminently more correct, but it might not be as provocative and descriptive. And that's why I want to get your thoughts about this information paradox, which we hear a lot about. And every so often friends of mine like Sabina Hassanfelder who's been a guest on the show, she's kind of a little bit of a snarky, you know, cantankerous

scientist, theoretical physicist and she always, whenever there's a new paper about the black hole information paradox, she goes, oh, it's been solved again, you know, so it's the question, is it really a paradox? Is it just hype? She claims it's complete hype,

and many people do because it relies on something, you know, we're associated with hawking radiation, which is, you know, in principle, observable, but in practice, unobservable, just the time scales involved. And yet, and yet, when I had Lenny Susskind on, he said that the, what he calls the stretched horizon, which is, I think, a one plank length above the event horizon, is the most interesting aspect, not the singularity. And so talk about what else we can learn that's surprising from, let's talk about the next generation event horizon. Can that, can that telescope,

Will you be able to learn more about, you know, getting ever closer to the event horizon such that perhaps you specifically could, not you, your collaboration that you lead could comment on the information paradox and help to resolve it from an experimental point of view rather than just, you know, people like Hawking conceding it, you know, to a bet, to win a bet with John Preskill past guest on the show? So talk about that. Can the NGVHT, what is it? and how will it improve our knowledge, potentially or not, of the information loss paradox? Yeah, well, there's a lot to unpack there. I like your show. So the first thing is that just briefly, the NG-EHT is the next phase of the EHT. And we want to add enough sites around the globe to double the number of dishes that are working.

And because the number of baseline pairs then increases as the square of the number of dishes, we get four times as much data. We're increasing our bandwidth for sensitivity. And what we want to do is move from making still images of black holes to movies. And more than that, we want to increase the frequency of the observations, which then increases our angular resolution. So the sharpness of these images will increase. And that's important getting to the potentially the information paradox,

because as I mentioned earlier in the show, the shadow is made up of concentric rings. And these happen for the following reason. Most of the bright emission you see in this shadow feature is light that's bent around the black hole. It comes directly to us from behind the black hole and it's bent around it. But there's an interior ring, that we call the n equals one ring, not obvious but geeky reasons, where the light has made a U-turn around the black hole. black hole. So it's really sampling now the intense curvature of space time when it goes around. And then that ring is interior to that shadow, and it's much thinner. So it encodes in a more

detailed way, GR, and the space time around the black hole. Now, there's an infinite number of these rings. The n-equals two ring is made up of photons that do a full U-turn. They wouldn't make an orbit around the entire black hole. They are now sensing the space-time much closer to the event horizon. And you can imagine as you go to an equal four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, that you're getting asymptotically close to the true horizon, the true photon orbit.

Right. Now, the longer these photons stay in this area, the more probability that, the higher the probability that they could start to either scatter off of some quantum state or they could sense something, that happens on very long time scales. So potentially,

and we'd have to build a next next generation of an horizon telescope, but if we could parlay this infinite nest of rings into a sensory apparatus that potentially could be

potentially tell us something about the quantum state's interiors of the black hole, that would be something that could start to tell us something about the information paradox or this one plank length stretched horizon above the true horizon. So it's not a great answer, but we're always thinking about the next thing and black holes are so strange, they're so fractal in the way they bend light, that this could just be an inroad into what the interior of the black hole looks like. excellent so before we turn to the human interest portion on the podcast i want to ask a couple of more

a couple of more questions of the technical bent this one coming from another audience member who is asking in general about the prospects for multi-messinger um uh learnings about black holes courtesy of eht and ngheh plus x where x could be anything but i'm going to add meerkat which just last week had these incredible images. And the radio, Mirkats, a precursor to the square kilometer array, which will be the biggest radio telescope of its kind ever deployed. Not the longest baseline, you guys on that distinction, at least until somebody, you know, Elon builds another space intoerometer in space.

But I want to ask you about the prospects for multi-messinger astronomy and what you thought when you saw the Mirkat images, which are just stunning to look at, And in particular, if you do release Sagittarius A-Star and hope that you'll do that here first before you go to some APS press card, you'll come on the end to The Impossible Podcasts with yours truly. And you'll announce it and then later you'll go to Stockholm or where we're going to go. But anyway, answer this question, please. If Meerkat, if EHT does image Sage A-Star, could you immediately use some of the data from Mirkat or other high-precision measurements in a completely different radio wavelength band? Yeah, really, really good.

And again, another astute question. So first, the multi-messinger aspect. We'll get to Mirkat in a moment. There are huge potential connections between the EHT and many other facilities. You know, we're now at the smallest scales where you can study black holes. We're at the event horizon. We're seeing light bending around it. And when you look at these black holes in the x-ray,

when you look at them in the infrared, even in gamma rays, a lot of the emission, we think, comes from right near the event horizon. So one of the games that we like to play is looking at flaring activity. Because when you're so close to the black hole, it's roiling, it's bubbling, it's boiling, and every once in a while you'll get a magnetic reconnection event, we think, where magnetic fields are so torped up, they're so twisted, they're so intertwined, they will then snap, reconnect, and will these huge amounts of energy, and we get flares. So if you look at the at Sajah star in the center of our galaxy, you'll see X-ray flares that are

50 times the normal fluence, 50 times the amount of energy normally coming out of them. And if we could catch that with the EHG, we could tell you what was happening when that flare went off, right? You could see it erupt in the image, potentially. And that would tell us, us a huge amount about how black holes accrete, how they deform the space time around them, how they launch jets. So this is one of the real key questions for modern astronomy, and it relies completely on multi-messinger. We need to see it in the x-ray, so we understand how all the electrons are emitting across the spectrum. We need to see it evolve spatially, and that will tell us a lot about what's happening very close to the black hole. Now for Mirkat,

First of all, those images are astounding. Yeah. I mean, as they say, you can't make that up. I mean, there are some really crazy structures in the center of our galaxy, exploding supernovae, pulsars, zipping off in different directions, something called the mouse, something called the snake. I mean, you have to think about the animal kingdom just to capture the richness of what we're seeing. But interestingly,

the E.HT and Mirkat don't actually play too well together because Mirkat is at such a lower frequency. So, Sadie Star, for example, is kind of shrouded by this plasma, and it's only by going to very high frequencies that we can see all the way to the center of the black hole.

If Mirkat were to look at Sagittary Seastar, it would just see this blob. And so Mirkat is looking on much wider size scales. And the EHD, because of its intense resolving power, only can really look at a very small portion of the sky. So they're not, Mirkap creates the context in which Sagittar exists and which we study it with the E.D. But it'd be hard to look at the data simultaneously between the two instruments. Got it. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes.

At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. So we'll come back to maybe some technical things when we finish out our audience question segment. I hope you have 15 more minutes, Shep, is that okay? Oh, yeah, absolutely. Okay, awesome. So we've presented a story of you as a scientist. But now I want to take a step back and talk about you as a human being and things that interest you and things that drive you and allow you to persevere past the many, many challenges, human, technical, political, financial, cultural that you've had to endure.

But let me let's go back really far back. And I've asked this of the, you know, a dozen Nobel laureates I've had on the show. And I want to ask you. So what drew you to what you do now in your. youth. Was there something in particular that, you know, initiated this love of astronomy and then led to, you know, radio astronomy as your particular sub-specialty? Wow. You know, I don't think so. I was not a boy astronomer. You know, I wasn't grinding my own lenses. I wasn't, you know, out in the backyard with a telescope, anything like that.

I did see an eclipse when I was 13, which made a huge impression on the total eclipse of the sun I think it was 1980. But, you know, I think I caught the bug when I went to Antarctica. So after I graduated college, I graduated pretty early. It was only about 19 when I graduated. That was kind of burned out. And I saw this note that said, go to Antarctica. You know, like, do all this crazy, amazing stuff.

Low wages, a certain chance of death, like the shackleton advertisement, that appealed to you. Yeah, nothing like that. joining the Shackleton expedition. There was a stowaway, apparently, on that. Yeah, that's right. So, but I got down there, and I really got bitten by the bug of doing science in challenging circumstances. You know, what do you do when you're really, you have to be self-reliant?

When you want to fix something, you have to fix it yourself. There's no radio shack down the road. And so I really liked that. And then when I got to MIT for grad school, I got connected. fairly quickly with this VLBI group doing this radio interfermetric observing, because I like going to different places, making these systems work, bringing all the data back together, making these images of the sky with unparalleled angular resolution. But like everybody, we all want to discover something new. Like doing incremental science is fantastic. I mean,

that's the way most science is done. We all get together. We move the ball down the field. But I think that a lot of us are just thinking, God, how can I just do something really out there? And that was this project, the EHT. I looked at this and after doing the, you know, paying my dues, doing all the grunt work to learn radio interferometry and doing a lot of observations, I saw this opportunity and I said,

no one's really working on this. Everyone thinks this is a too hard. It's not the right time. We'll never get the funding for it. And I threw myself into it. And it turns out that when you do that, I think, what was it good to? We said, you attempt great things and cosmic forces will come to your aid,

that kind of thing. I'm not sure who said that. But it really was that kind of thing. We got a small group together. We made our first observations with the entirely new instrumentation, purpose built for this experiment. And we took risks. and that was the big thing

that we took risks and so if you asked me what got me into this it was the love of instrumentation but also the confidence that we could do something that was really meaningful and interesting

and new yeah something deep and undone so when I think about you know people that coming up, obviously there are always challenges. It sounds like you were burned out at a certain point, and then this reinvigorated this new intellectual passion for you. For somebody that's struggling with such things themselves, you know, burnout is quite real. I make the joke sometimes

that I, you know, as an astronomer, I spend more time on telecons than telescopes. How do you deal with the burnout, you know, lately with, you know, the proliferation of Zoom, you know, is great, on one hand, because we can have all these meetings instantaneously, don't have to travel, get on an airplane, you know, get sick, and then bring it back, and then, you know, lose time traveling or commuting even. But what have we lost? And how do you personally deal with these, you know, the challenges, the burnout? You know, it's a real phenomenon in academia.

And even a lot of my listeners that aren't in academia, this new reality that we're living in with multi-continental collaboration has kind of put you in a unique position to comment on it. So how do you deal with it? What's your routine like? Do you have any tips for listeners? Yeah. Well, so first of all, the H-T has always been a global endeavor.

You know, we reach across borders. So first of all, the H-T has always been a global endeavor. You know, we reach across borders. We tap into expertise wherever we find it. By the nature of the project, we have to bring telescopes together. So there's this sense that, you know, we do this together. or we don't do it at all. I think there's an African proverb I've heard that says

if you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together. So at first we went fast, but then to image the black hole, we had to go together. So there was an understanding that this really was a moment for the world to come together

in a certain way and solve a problem that no one group could do by themselves. So that was definitely part of it. But we do, struggle with the collaboration aspect of it. We've always been on Zoom. We've always been on telecons, but now we're 100% on telecons and people are burning out because you need that face-to-face contact. One of the ways I describe it to my team is that on Zoom, it's very difficult to be quiet.

So when I sit in front of a whiteboard with my team and we're all scribbling things on the whiteboard, At some point, there's a moment when everybody just stops talking. And people are just digesting what they're seeing. And they're going through their own internal process. And they're trying to think about what comes next. And on Zoom, you don't have that silence. So there's a way in which people, when they get together, operate differently than on Zoom. So if people are getting burned out, I hear you.

If people think things are not normal, I hear you. We are muddling along as best we can. And now I'm thankful that we're able to start meeting in person again. So at Harvard, where we have the Black Hole Initiative offices, we are coming together. And we're sitting in front of whiteboards and it's working out well. But it's a challenge. It really is. The E.S.G result resonated with a lot of people.

I mean, we conservatively estimate that a billion people have seen this image. And it was on the front page, just about every newspaper on the planet. So it was a moment when everybody's eyes were fixated on one thing at one time. And when you combine that with the near instantaneous Twitter sphere and the near instantaneous social media sphere, you create an environment where the unintended can happen, the unintended almost must happen. And in addition to all the wonderful coverage that we got

and the wonderful interviews that I gave, that Katie gave, that many people in the collaboration gave. There were things that people grabbed onto that I think were a little bit darker. Katie is an absolutely wonderful researcher, and she played a key role in all of the work that we did, as well as other junior collaborators. We have early career scientists, really,

were the lifeblood of this collaboration. And I would say that people came to her to her defense. It was quite unfortunate. I think that the people who were criticizing the process or who went negative did not understand the way we work as a team. And that's really what this was. It was a team effort. And so for them to pick apart the team was something that was foreign to all of us. And it was unwelcome. And I don't think it was right. And thankfully, we all supported Katie and she's now gone on to be junior faculty at Caltech and is doing absolutely wonderfully, as are many of the early career people in our group. And so I think that in the end, as my departed mom used to say, living well is the best revenge, maybe many people say that. So just relying on the team and understanding internally what we did was give us a lot of security. So last couple questions from the audience have to do with aspects of relativity that perhaps may or may not be particularly relevant, but let me ask them.

Can you see other sources compact objects? You said before you can't rule out that this isn't some kind of dark star, boson star, whatever. Are there other potential target science opportunities with EHT as it is for looking at massive objects that may not be black holes? That's very interesting. So the EHT is also looking at other black holes for which we don't have the angular resolution to see the shadow, but where we can see the jets that are powered by the black holes as they emerge from the center part of the galaxy. and understanding how those columnate, how they accelerate, how they transport energy and matter across galactic scales,

that's an entirely new and interesting and exciting cottage industry. So, you know, it's one of those situations where in our spare time, we also look at these incredibly interesting other sources too. So there's a lot that the E.T. can do when it's not looking at the shadows. There are also astronomical mazes. So these are sources where you get amplification of light in a certain wave band, just like a laser pointer that you might use during a presentation, but it happens in space on much larger scales. And some of those molecular transitions occur in the waveband of the EHT. So we may be able to use the EHT to study dying stars or star-forming regions where some of these lasers and mazes occur in the atmospheres of stars.

So a completely different kind of context. So we're looking at this interesting technique and we're finding new applications all the time. And lastly, talk about the images of the polarization, one of my favorite topics. What did that add to our understanding of M87 and what future incarnations of the polar metric capabilities of EHT will potentially lead to in or without NGEHT?

Right. So the polarization images were really wonderful because the whole reason that black holes shine in the radio is because of synchrotron radiation. And that's high speed, high energy electrons orbiting magnetic fields. If there are no magnetic fields, you're not seeing any of this radiation. So we knew there were these magnetic fields, but understanding the structure of them also tells you how the black hole is feeding. So there's one. mode of feeding in which you have something called a magnetically arrested disc where the plasma that's funneling tours the black hole pushes the magnetic field so that it becomes stiff and it stops any more accretion from happening so it's it's an arrested disc and that has one form of magnetic field around it then you have standard and normal evolution which is more of a of a of a torturous kind of random magnetic field that operates around the black hole. And we're now being able to, we're now telling the difference between these. So we're now looking at the M87, realizing that it does seem to operate like a magnetically

arrested disc. And so now we understand from these magnetic fields how matter is actually getting funneled through the event horizon. So it's a big advance. Outstanding. All right. Well, we have reached the end of the regularly scheduled programming content. And if you'll indulge me for a few more minutes, I know it's been a wonderful long conversation, but with time dilation, perhaps we'll be able to play around with that perception for the listeners. But if you'll indulge me, I'd like to go into the impossible with Dr. Shep Dolman, answering my three patented, thrilling three final questions of existential reality. You said this place was steps from the water.

We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your oceanfront room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now.

Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton for the stay. Okay, I'm ready. Okay, here we go. So the first question that I ask all my listeners

is what would you put in your ethical will, not your material will? So in the Hebrew tradition, which I partaken, there's a document called the Zava-A, which is an ethical will, and it's meant to convey and articulate an inheritance of wisdom to not only your biological errors, but your ideological heirs, of which there are many. They're not only for Jews or for President Obama made one, and you can find them all online. I want to ask you, what would you put in an ethical will encapsulating the wisdom of, you know, kind of the inheritance that you'd most like to leave to those that come after you? Wow. It's really a wonderful, wonderful question. A few things come to mind. One is, it sounds a little odd, but don't take no for an answer. I mean, no is always an opportunity. And you can do it. it in a nice way. You can do it in an ethical way, but you can always push the boundaries.

And as long as you do it in the right way, a no can be very powerful. So, you know, you can't do this. No, I'm going to try to do this anyway. So it's very important to understand that. The other thing I'd say is allowing yourself to depend on others is a very important thing if you do something really grand. You can't do everything yourself. And believing in and creating an environment for other people to do their work is a very important legacy. Those are things that I'm thinking of at the moment.

Okay. Thank. That is wonderful. Let us go to the second of the thrilling three final questions. And that is a kind of callback to the progenitor of the name of this podcast, Arthur see Clark, you'll find out about why that is in just a bit, but Arthur C. Clark in his famous movie that was turned into a movie, his book that was turned into a movie, a space odyssey, there are these mysterious monoliths that kind of populate the universe on Earth and on the moon

in space, et cetera, et cetera. And we're not really sure what they are. They could be a warning, they could be a weapon, they could be a time capsule, which is the way I like to think about them. And I'll ask you, if you had a time capsule that would outlive you. You know, you not past your mortal coil, you know, years of 120 in the biblical sense. But if you were able to reach, you know, out to a billion years, not you personally, but you could put anything, any information whatsoever on a monolith that would last for so long, what would it be? What would it comprise, scientifically speaking? Is this like a bit of information that goes in there? Yeah, it would be you could engrave it. You could put a CD-ROM on it. You could put

correlator tape on it from, you can do whatever you want with it. It's going to last for a billion years, and it's meant to convey what human beings had accomplished, not just you maybe specifically, but what the human civilization had accomplished to some futuristic alien species. Wow. Well, I guess, you know, I would put an image

of the light bending around the black hole with the right proportions so that the people many, many billions of years from now would know that we had understood that light bends around a black hole. Because I'm sure that black holes would be understood by alien civilizations to be as crazy as we think they are. And so giving them some understanding that we knew what those were and that we had imaged one, I think they would look at that and say, they had it going on. They knew what was going on. They accomplished something. All right.

All right. Here we go. The final thrilling three, third question, which relates to one of Arthur C. Clark's famous laws. He had a law that you probably heard. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. So you and EHT are performing a type of magic. He also said something that I left to pull out on my department chair from time to time. He said, for every expert, there's an equal and opposite expert.

And then he said his third law was the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. That's the origin of the name of this podcast. And so I want to ask you kind of advice to your former self. What mysterious aspect of your life perplexed you as a 20-year-old? a 30-year-old, and yet eventually provided you with great clarity and sort of an inciting incident that led to a breakthrough to make you who you are today. So advice to your former self, what kind of pushed you into the impossible? Well, I guess I would say that this realization

that failure is okay, that you really do need to fail in order to understand what it is you want to do and how you want to do it and what's possible. I mean, if you're not, if you're not failing, then you're not testing the boundaries. And I think it's hard for people to fail. It's really difficult because we're always told, you know, don't fail. Like, don't mess up, you know, do this. Eat your, eat your breakfast, you know. Like, I failed and I get my breakfast. But, but, but in, in your career, uh, failing is just, is so important. and to embrace that, it's antithetic, it's kind of antithetical, but to embrace that leads to a lot of very, very interesting things.

So that's my, if I had to go back and talk to myself, I'd say fail more. I always get tickled by the fact that, you know, there's this Google Ngram searcher. You can search on phrases and how often they've been used in the context of different phrases is that if you search the phrase, in quotes, it was the best thing that ever happened. to me. And then you ask, well, what sentence came right before that sentence? And it's always, I failed. I got fired. You know, I lost this, you know, this prize, you know, whatever. And because of that, it leads to great growth. And, you know, there's a saying, I forget, maybe it's a rabbi. Maybe it's Yogi Berra. Who knows the difference. And it's, you know, there is no success without failure.

You really cannot achieve greatness without risking when, and that also entails failure as part of the success process. So Shep Dolman, an incredible interview, a really wonderfully vulnerable side of you, which will delight my audience, but also very technical, nerdy and fun, which will delight, you know, the other half of my audience. So I do want to express my deep gratitude on behalf of myself, my listeners, for going into the impossible with yours truly and spending so much of your valuable time on me. And I don't know, I wish you the best in your success and offer you our deepest gratitude for opening with your colleagues this phenomenal view of the universe. Well, thanks very much, Brian. It's been a pleasure.

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