First Photo of Black Hole Released

[peter]

Bit of a tack change, I'm interested what this picture tells us about the scientific method?

I'm going to assume that this picture is just the same as the one of you or me on the beach on our holidays, only the light was way more difficult to collect, done iirc by loads of different telescopes pointed at the thing and then the final image being made up from the multitude of individual images obtained thereby. But the point being, this is a light generated image of a thing that exists. This is what it would actually look like to you or me as we approached it, assuming we could do so and live.

So we have a situation here where a thing that was born in the mind of a mathematician, that was predicted as a purely theoretical object (not like the planet Uranus, because we already knew what planets were, that they existed when Uranus was theoreticised) has been actualised by physical proof. I guess the Higgs boson would also qualify for this, but we can't actually see that so it remains somewhat theoretical, so sticking with the black hole, was the process of conception through to actualisation inductive, deductive, a combination of both?

This photo has to be a true milestone in our understanding of our understanding, if you get me, as well as a breakthrough in the actual area of the discipline in which it is concerned.

[Vraith]

a true milestone in our understanding of our understanding, if you get me, as well as a breakthrough in the actual area of the discipline in which it is concerned.

Yea...a lot of words being written on that.

On other stuff:

I think the picture was mostly in radio frequencies, and so the color isn't true color, but yea on the rest. [[Though I'd bet if anyone has other spectrum pics, they could calculate and convert and create a true-color pic. It would probably look just the same, except blurry white with a blurry black center.]]

It came about by a mix roughly as you suggest...the basic story, if accurate, observation of how bodies move, thought experiment/imagination on that movement, conversion of that idea into mathematical and general form, then a guy [Schwarzchild, who doesn't get nearly enough props for all the stuff he did] supposedly while in the field working artillery, reframed and refined the math to exact solutions and eventually the idea of singularities/black holes, which Einstein really supposedly didn't believe in for a long time...but the math worked, and other predictions were confirmed by observations...rinse, repeat, take a picture of a supermassive black hole millions of light-years away.

[peter]

As concise and coherent a synopsis as I've yet come across V! The pics were all over the UK media last week but thanks to your op I heard it here first! Nice work.

[Hashi Lebwohl]

a-squared plus b-squared equals c-squared is TRUE on your map-paper, but it is FALSE on an actual globe. They require different math. Maths that contradict each other. [[but because we're smart we can code switch, and because of scale/size, many maths are often "close enough" even though, in real terms, they're always wrong.]]

This is no joke--spherical geometry and spherical analytic geometry are more difficult and the usual rules do not normally apply.

[Vraith]

a-squared plus b-squared equals c-squared is TRUE on your map-paper, but it is FALSE on an actual globe. They require different math. Maths that contradict each other. [[but because we're smart we can code switch, and because of scale/size, many maths are often "close enough" even though, in real terms, they're always wrong.]]

This is no joke--spherical geometry and spherical analytic geometry are more difficult and the usual rules do not normally apply.

Absolutely, no joke at all. and it's not just a couple, or a dozen, it's many many more maths than there are shapes of pasta...and every geometry based on a different shape of past requires different math.
[[Entirely different logics/maths are needed to describe the Flying Spaghetti Monster universe compared to the Flatulent Rotini-wieler verse, and the Linguini Lapidarial verse, etc. etc. etc.]]
Not to mention almost everything described by every system does not, and cannot, actually exist...we just accept the abstractions/definitions cuz it glues the other things together.

[peter]

We make it work heuristically?

[Vraith]

We make it work heuristically?

I wouldn't apply the word that way, feels not quite right to me...but I suppose it technically fits some aspects of it, at least in initial choice, when we're, say, first trying to explore a 4D space---we know some 3D things will transfer/continue, some won't, we guestimate/extrapolate/intuit to get started.
And when "close enough" is really "close enough." Technically, the shape of the Earth has some effect on how we should build tall buildings...but we use just ordinary planar maths to do it...cuz the results are "close enough,"---the effects of difference negligible.
But the closer one builds to a black hole, the more that curved space starts to matter...pretty quickly planar math won't work at all.

[Skyweir]

Wow brilliant input and discussion from everyone

As for me, it adds to my appreciation of the representational pictography. I mistakenly believed the pic itself was a photograph cos meh .. didnt know any better.

Very clever peeps