Looking at a black hole, A new way of seeing. 

On 10 th April 2019, the first ever image of a black hole was published by global media. A

black hole is a singularity of the space-time continuum, an object whose gravity is so large

that it traps light, forbidding it from returning to the vast outer space in the Universe.

With this image, a new paradigm of seeing has emerged. The image was the unlikely and

amazing outcome of a vast and incredibly sophisticated scientific collaboration called the Event Horizon Telescope,

which involved 200 scientists in 20 countries working together for

nearly a decade (Brian Resnick in Vox). This black hole whose image was captured by the

joint work of eight radio telescopes lies at the center of the Messier 87 galaxy. This black

hole is so vast that it has a mass of 6.5 billion suns and the force of its gravity propels jets

of plasma, moving at near the speed of light. One of the scientists who worked in the

team was Katie Bouman, the woman who coded the algorithm needed to reconstruct the

image of the black hole. Although with some differences in complexity, Bouman´s

algorithm is similar to the one that reconstructs the image of a human liver in an MRI

scan.

The thought

Seeing something used to be an experience involving the process visual stimuli of a special

place in the space around us, enters through our eyes and reaches the cortex in order for

our brain to build a representation of that something within the world. This process has

now become an intellectual, constructive, collective act and task where the image that

shall be seen needs to be incubated (for months, years) in order to emerge complete in

front of the eyes of the beholder. Is it possible to see this image and think, as the medieval

philosopher Aquinas thought, that the relations amongst the parts (of the images

collected by the radio telescopes) were at the end adjusted (with the aid of extremely

accurate atomic clocks) to such a special point as to make them appear as exquisite and,

eventually, showing humanity a path towards its soul? Might a collective epiphany have

enlightened the minds of a determined and passionate team of scientists when the image

of such an absolute nothingness was finally complete?