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The Black Hole Image Data Was Spread Across 5 Petabytes Stored On About Half a Ton of Hard Drives (vice.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: On Wednesday, an international team of scientists published the first image of a black hole ever. It looked like a SpaghettiO, and yet the image was an incredible scientific achievement that gave humanity a glimpse of one of the universe's most destructive forces and confirmed long-held theories -- namely, that black holes exist. Storing the raw data for the image was a feat itself -- tiny portions of data spread across five petabytes stored on multiple hard drives, the equivalent of 5,000 years worth of MP3s. Katie Bouman, a computer scientist and assistant professor at the California Institute of Technology, led the development of the algorithm that imaged the black hole. An image of her posing with some of the data drives went viral as observers praised her success.
The massive amounts of data were essential to creating the image of the black hole. Bouman and other scientists coordinated radio telescopes all over the Earth, each pointed at the black hole and gathering data at different times. The data scientists then pieced this information together and used an algorithm to fill in the blanks and generate a likely image of the black hole. The five petabytes of data took up such a massive amount of digital and physical space it couldn't be sent over the internet. Instead, the hard drives were flown to processing centers in Germany and Boston where the data was assembled. On Reddit's /r/datahoarder subreddit, a community dedicated to spreading the passion of hoarding vast amounts of data, the drives were bigger news than the scientific achievement itself.
The massive amounts of data were essential to creating the image of the black hole. Bouman and other scientists coordinated radio telescopes all over the Earth, each pointed at the black hole and gathering data at different times. The data scientists then pieced this information together and used an algorithm to fill in the blanks and generate a likely image of the black hole. The five petabytes of data took up such a massive amount of digital and physical space it couldn't be sent over the internet. Instead, the hard drives were flown to processing centers in Germany and Boston where the data was assembled. On Reddit's /r/datahoarder subreddit, a community dedicated to spreading the passion of hoarding vast amounts of data, the drives were bigger news than the scientific achievement itself.
Let's start measuring storage space by the ton! We can have Kilotons and Megatons...wait, that sounds very familiar...
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." -- Andrew S. Tanenbaum
Trying to look at star is also impossible because its surface masks everything underneath. And trying to look at a cup of coffee is also impossible because you're not really looking at the cup itself, just at the light which has reflected on it.
I can turn it upside down too: a black hole can be observed even better than a star because it doesn't have its own light so you can see the impact it has on its surroundings without interference from the central light source.
It's too much sophistry for me. You see a black hole because what it does with the things around it, and because you need a very busy place to create a big black hole you are going to see a lot of activity around it too once it's there.
And we are talking about radiotelescopes here. What you get is a signal from an antenna, and you have to recalculate the sources of the different waves the antenna recorded. The datapoints are just long lists of energy measurements from the different antennas.
We knew beforehand that M87 (a large eliptical galaxy about 55 million light years away) had a supermassive Black Hole at its center. There were estimates of its size from redshift measurements of the movements of the galaxy's center. Thus this is not a discovery we stumpled upon, this was a carefully selected target, and there were expectations beforehand how the picture should look like. A physicist who wrote his doctorial thesis on how a picture of a Black Hole should look like, gave a speech three month ago (albeit in German): Andreas Mueller: Foto eines Schwarzen Loches.
of a C130 loaded with Flashdrives flying at 700 mph. The latency is a bitch though.
If a prop-driven C-130 is traveling at 700MPH, your latency problem will be expiring very soon.
Unfortunately, it will be replaced by a much larger data loss problem...
She clearly didn't write the majority of the code. However it's entirely possible she's responsible for the math and/or the actual algorithm the code implements. There's a system used at my company that I wrote relatively little of the code for (mostly low-level stuff like high-performance maths primitives and zero-copy networking), but I had a lot of input into the design and how it's supposed to achieve what it does. I don't know enough about this project to comment on whether Bouman is or isn't the brain behind it. I'm just saying that from experience, there are plenty of cases where the person who designed the algorithm isn't the person who ultimately implemented it. They might be a shitty coder, or just have other responsibilities.
Erm...
I think you miss that this is a "real picture" of a black hole. It's black. That's the hole.
It bends space, time and light - correct. Anything past it's event horizon is lost forever, correct. But anything on the periphery isn't and arcs rounds and is fired back into space at random, almost... like a mirror. Light acts like a planet in orbit around the object, which means you can see all kinds of artifacts not caused by anything else, and can see light focused, diverted and spread from behind, in-front and the side of the object in question, producing bright halos of light - maybe from our own side of the galaxy - that orbited around the hole and came back our way.
And it's doing that in all dimensions. And depending on the tilt of the accretion disc, you'll see parts of that disc caught up in it / blocking light, which is why the halo isn't even - the accretion disc is tilted from our viewpoint.
Black holes are "invisible". But their presence makes everything near them go really weird and not like a standard piece of space at all.
You can even measure the Schwarzchild radius from the size of the haloes because parts of it will be directly related to certain multiples of the radius.
The black hole is only a point to us because it warps space, too. Whether it's actually a "point" in its local reference frame is another matter entirely.
She designed the algorithm. This does not necessarily relates to lines of code. Also eht-imaging is used for a wide area of applications. Mr. Chael is a PhD student at Harvard working on that piece of software. While Dr. Bouman performed the analysis and "developed the algorithm that turned telescopic data into the historic photo we see today". Here is her CV https://people.csail.mit.edu/k...
If Chael had done all this, his supervisors had claimed that or pushed that he would have been in the media.
Honestly, would you question her abilities if she would have been a male professor?
As someone who's entire job is taking scientist's algorithms and explaining them to computers, number of lines of code contributes has nothing to do with how much of the 'brains' one is behind something.
Manbabies don't know the difference. All they have is some dim recognition that being marginally competent and male is no longer enough to get by and scares the shit out of them.
She designed the algorithm.
The NY Times says it wasn't the algorithm used to make the final picture. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/0...
While she led the development of an algorithm to take a picture of a black hole, an effort that was the subject of a TED Talk she gave in 2016, her colleagues said that technique was not ultimately used to create this particular image.
But that doesn't diminish her contribution to the project or her skills. She is clearly a skilled scientist but you have to read her actual articles to see that. By misrepresenting her role in the project you miss an opportunity to give her credit for the cool things she actually did. Not to mention the other 39 women and 160 men who also worked on the project.
All science is provisional, but some science is less provisional. Every test we've flung at general relativity over the last century has confirmed it. While it's not complete (Quantum Mechanics is not accounted for), it is as much settled science as one can get. Your problem is ignorance of how science works, coupled with pedantry, so that somehow you imagine you can usefully critique theories which you clearly know absolutely nothing about. You're arrogant and ignorant, but obviously not stupid, so instead of constructing versions of science that don't exist to cover up your lack of knowledge, just pick up some god-damned literature on the subject and fill the void that you have mistaken for intellectual curiosity.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Which happens to look exactly how we'd expect to see the simulation that was done for Interstellar to look if we saw it from where we are, and with the equipment we have.
Honestly, you're directly getting photons for which the last thing they touched was a black hole 6.5 billion times the mass of the Sun, in the middle of another galaxy, 53.5m years ago, 53.5m light years away.
The picture isn't photographically beautiful because it never would be at those kinds of distances. That it even *exists* and produces anything at all is astounding.
She clearly didn't write the majority of the code.
However it's entirely possible she's responsible for the math and/or the actual algorithm the code implements.
From The internet’s idiots are already trying to discredit Katie Bouman’s historic accomplishments:
The criticism claiming Bouman is just one name of a few on the research paper shows a misunderstanding of how academic papers work. Bouman is the first author of her paper “Computational Imaging for VLBI Image Reconstruction.” The first author on a research paper is typically the person who made the most important contributions. Alongside Bouman, Michael D. Johnson, Daniel Zoran, Vincent L. Fish, Sheperd S. Doeleman, and William T. Freeman worked to produce their findings.
“Of course Bouman will not have written all of the code, just like Englert and Higgs are not solely responsible for the discovery of the Higgs boson. ..." Wade said.
In the discussion on Hacker News, and even in our own Facebook comment section, multiple users claim Bouman’s colleague Andrew Chael wrote over 850,000 lines of the 900,000 lines of code used to discover the black hole. Chael tweeted to her defense, saying that without Bouman and her contribution to the software, the project would never have been a success.
So, with respect to a successful outcome, does it really matter how *many* lines of code she (or someone) wrote, especially if her/their code and/or other contributions made everything work?
I imagine we've all heard the joke about getting an itemized bill like: $0.50: Pushing a button; $99.50: Knowing what button to push.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Completely false. From Chael's own words:
BTW, Chael is gay. So congratulations on supporting him.
As to Bouman herself, she isn't the one taking credit. She has said repeatedly it was a collaborative effort:
So yeah it seems a lot of political science was involved here.
Sure was, it came from only one group who was so incensed a woman could do anything remarkable it had to jump up and down, wave its hands, and put out fake information to make itself feel better.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Following up whit this information from To undermine Katherine Bouman's role in the Black Hole photo, trolls held up a white man as the real hero -- until he fought back
The misleading posts said Chael alone had authored "850,000 of the 900,000 lines of code that were written in the historic black-hole image algorithm!" ...
However, the effort quickly backfired.
Though it may have been nice to receive more recognition, Chael immediately took to Twitter to explain that the online trolls had exaggerated his contributions, and he defended Bouman's work. In addition, Chael said that as an openly gay man, he is also an underrepresented demographic in STEM.
Chael disputed the incorrect posts
I did not write "850,000 lines of code" -- many of those "lines" tracked by github are in model files. There are about 68,000 lines in the current software, and I don't care how many of those I personally authored.
[... several tweets referenced ...]
While I appreciate the congratulations on a result that I worked hard on for years, if you are congratulating me because you have a sexist vendetta against Katie, please go away and reconsider your priorities in life.
Chael wrote the code for one of three scripted code pipelines that scientists used to transform telescope data into a coherent image.
Bouman has emphasized collaboration
Though Bouman has received a lot of attention, she has maintained that the black hole image was the product of teamwork.
"No one of us could've done it alone," Bouman told CNN. "It came together because of lots of different people from many backgrounds." The Event Horizon Telescope project was composed of an international team of more than 200 researchers.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .