Here’s how House Speaker Nancy Pelosi put it:Ĭongratulations to Dr. Once the MIT image of Bouman started to go viral, she was suddenly the lone genius behind the Event Horizon Telescope’s groundbreaking discovery. The biggest recent discoveries in physics - of the Higgs boson, of gravitational waves, of this black hole image - still involve a huge number of people working over the span of decades. But especially in present times, science is hardly ever a solitary endeavor. Sure, sometimes the “lone genius” trope is warranted. It’s how the history of science is often told: The world exists one way, and then people such as Issac Newton, Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, and the like come along and shake up our fundamental understanding of things. In telling stories about science, there’s a bias in our culture to focus on the lone genius. Bouman was involuntarily cast in the trope of the “lone genius” - something that’s usually applied to men Lastly, to combat this hostility, we need to see more images of women thriving in science. Another is that women often don’t feel welcome in scientific fields - and the reaction to Bouman’s picture reveals hostility many women scientists face all the time. One is that while the “lone genius” narrative can be tantalizing, it’s almost never true, especially in science. ![]() There’s a lot of nonsense tied up in this episode - and we wouldn’t even be talking about it if platforms like Twitter, Reddit, and YouTube didn’t allow trollish thinking to fester and spread virally.īut there are a few key takeaways. “People began going over her work to see how much she’d really contributed to the project that skyrocketed her to unasked-for fame.” It set off “what can only be described as a sexist scavenger hunt,” as The Verge described it, in which an apparently small group of vociferous men questioned Bouman’s role in the project. It quickly went viral, and news outlets including the New York Times began hailing Bouman as the “face of the black hole project.”īut then all the attention became a catalyst for a sexist backlash on social media and YouTube. This is a photo of a pure “eureka!” moment. This photo shows the first time she saw the results of that work, with the black hole image on her computer screen. Katie Bouman is a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard who helped develop the code to find the black hole needle in the haystack of data collected from the effort. #EHTBlackHole #BlackHoleDay #BlackHole (v/ /n0ZnIoeG1d- MIT CSAIL April 10, 2019 ![]() ![]() Here's the moment when the first black hole image was processed, from the eyes of researcher Katie Bouman.
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