Capturing a Massive Black Hole

A halo of gas surrounding a black hole.
(Note: this is not an artist's rendering.)

"No single telescope is powerful enough to image the black hole. So, in the biggest experiment of its kind, Prof Sheperd Doeleman of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics led a project to set up a network of eight linked telescopes. Together, they form the Event Horizon Telescope and can be thought of as a planet-sized array of dishes.
Each is located high up at a variety of exotic sites, including on volcanoes in Hawaii and Mexico, mountains in Arizona and the Spanish Sierra Nevada, in the Atacama Desert of Chile, and in Antarctica.

A team of 200 scientists pointed the networked telescopes towards M87 and scanned its heart over a period of 10 days. The information they gathered was too much to be sent across the internet. Instead, the data was stored on hundreds of hard drives that were flown to a central processing centres in Boston, US, and Bonn, Germany, to assemble the information. Prof Doeleman described the achievement as 'an extraordinary scientific feat.'
'We have achieved something presumed to be impossible just a generation ago,' he said.


Prof Heino Falcke, of Radboud University in the Netherlands, who proposed the experiment, told BBC News that the black hole was found in a galaxy called M87. 'What we see is larger than the size of our entire Solar System,' he said. 'It has a mass 6.5 billion times that of the Sun. And it is one of the heaviest black holes that we think exists. It is an absolute monster, the heavyweight champion of black holes in the Universe.'"

- From the April 10th BBC report: First ever black hole image released.


"The physicist Stephen Hawking's greatest early-career contribution to physics was the idea of 'Hawking radiation' - that black holes aren't actually black, but emit small amounts of radiation over time. The result was hugely important, because it showed that once a black hole stops growing, it will start to very slowly shrink from the energy loss.

But the Event Horizons Telescope didn't confirm or deny this theory, Bonning said, not that anyone expected it to. Giant black holes like the one in Virgo A, she said, emit only minimal amounts of Hawking radiation compared to their overall size. While our most advanced instruments can now detect the bright lights of their event horizons, there's little chance that they will ever tease out the ultra-dim glow of a supermassive black hole's surface.

So what did we actually learn from this image?

First, physicists learned that Einstein was right, once again. The edge of the shadow, as far as the Event Horizons Telescope can see, is a perfect circle, just as physicists in the 20th century working with Einstein's equations of general relativity predicted. 'I don't think anyone should be surprised when yet another test of general relativity passes,' Bonning said. 'If they had walked on stage and said that general relativity had broken, I would have fallen off my chair.'

The result with more immediate, practical implications, she said, was that the image enabled scientists to precisely measure the mass of this supermassive black hole, which sits 55 million light-years away at the heart of the Virgo A galaxy."

- From the April 10th LiveScience article: 3 Huge Questions the Black Hole Image Didn't Answer.

Le Portail des Papillons

Le Portail des Papillons (The Portal of Butterflies) - digital - 2018, DS.

(Click to enlarge.)

(Note: Sorry for the delay; this post is now complete.)


"Part of me likes the idea that I somehow persist after biological death; it might even be possible, albeit in ways currently antithetical to materialistic science. Empirical science (as currently practiced) may be missing something crucial; if consciousness exists after the demise of its neurological substrate, then it's likely our current definition of consciousness is simply wrong-headed. Maybe brains are more akin to receivers than computers and we're all tuned to the same channel, or at least the same spectrum."

- Mac Tonnies from this September, 2004 Posthuman Blues post.

"Famed astrophysicist Stephen Hawking says black holes, the mysterious massive vortexes formed from collapsed stars, do not destroy everything they consume but instead eventually fire out matter and energy 'in a mangled form.'"

The bad part about this is that, according to Hawking, black holes can't be used as portals to parallel universes; I'd hoped that some black holes might function as "emergency exits" when the universe begins to die (whether through runaway expansion or the reverse pyrotechnics of the "Big Crunch").

I still haven't quite given up; I leave the task of migrating to other universes to posthuman ingenuity."

- Mac Tonnies from this July, 2004 Posthuman Blues post. The artist's interpretation of a black hole (inset right) was found via this article.

"The problem of “translating the untranslatable” was addressed by the 16th century alchemist Gerhard Dorn, with the notion of what he called the spiracle – in Latin, the Spiraculum Eternitatis, the window or breathing hole into eternity, which Jung writes about extensively as the conjunction of opposites in Mysterium Coniunctionis. The spiracle is described as a hole or passageway in the field of consciousness that allows the “autonomous dynamism of the collective unconscious” to break through into the realm of the personal unconscious. In this joining, it can, to some degree, be worked and translated into living, material reality, whether through word, image, other expressive means, or through lived life itself.  (von Franz, 1980)...

Dorn conceived of the spiracle as a window to eternity, a mysterious center pre-existent in us, linking us to the cosmos, while opening up and bridging the different levels of body, soul and spirit. Through the spiracle one may journey across the threshold in between the above and below, and bring traces of one world into the other and back again – a kind of conception and cross-fertilization between inconsonant realms. The spiracle links and joins these different levels, rendering it possible to reconcile incommensurable opposites through finding a third – a new space or medium which is neither one nor the other, but both."

- Excerpt from an intriguing online Arras article (.pdf): The Spiracle in Alchemy and Art by Diane Fremont (2017). Inset left is the title page from Gerhard Dorn's alchemical text Chymisticum artificium.

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In a matter of days the subtitle of Post-Mac Blues will change... from an "8 Year Post-Mac Time Capsule" to a 9 year one. Yes, it's been close to a decade since Mac has been gone and this memorial was initially created. That the two anniversaries should fall mid-autumn on and around the "Day of the Dead" is one of life's little ironies.

This post was slated to appear October 18th, the anniversary of the actual day of Mac's passing... but, as things generally go, neither my muse (nor my more practical self) were quite prepared. In effect, I drew a blank. What could I possibly have to say after nine years that hasn't been said many times in the past? The only plan which came to me was to draw attention to the fact that the number 9 is, theoretically and esoterically, the number of completion...  a rite of passage and the end of a cycle. But, during the course of blogging, I probably mentioned that before, too.

As it happened, it was a dream - specifically the end of a dream - which inadvertently set my little grey cells in motion. The dream featured butterflies (like the Tiger Swallowtail inset left)... and that's about all I'm willing to divulge, but, I had reason to believe that it was, in part, a message from Mac. Okay, not a lengthy report... just a little news flash, as in "Hi again, I'm okay; just passing through..."

But, no, it doesn't really matter if anyone - including myself - believes the dream truly held a message... nor if all those presently reading these paragraphs assume I'm deluded. I often am. The bottom line is that, when I awoke, I felt quite refreshed and almost happy. As this is a rare occurrence, I must conclude that something extraordinary happened.

For those of you who have no knowledge of this sort of thing, that is: the sudden, unwarranted appearance of butterflies (or dragonflies, cicadas, hummingbirds and the like) before, at the time, or just after a loved one's death, the fact is, it's actually a commonplace occurrence in the realm of mediumistic phenomena. Formally referred to as "After Death Communications" (ADCs), it seems many bereaved people are visited by these same, small creatures (mentioned above) in odd ways... encounters which produce an unusually strong emotional response. Most often, the events reported occur in the waking state. But, regarding dreams, well, if there is any ideal "medium" for mediumistic phenomena, the lucid dream would have to be a major contender. And, why is this? Dreams, meta-communications - and even artistic endeavors - rely (heavily) upon symbols, archetypes, interpretations and enigmatic synchronistic events. Like cryptic notes from a shadowy underground, they are all ambiguous. But, then again, when dealing with loss, sometimes they're all we have...

Stephen Hawking (1942-2018) (Updated 3/18/18)

From the PBS series of the same name.

"This could well be our final century. But I agree with Stephen Hawking: If we can begin to migrate into space -- and reap the rewards waiting for us there -- we will have ensured a certain immortality. And there's real reason to hope we can create a "back-up," whether on the strange gray shores of the Moon, the mysterious wastes of Mars, or both. Indeed, stark environmental realities, exacerbated by a surging population, have made space migration imperative for a long-term human future."

- Mac Tonnies from this (2006) PHB post.

***

Mac mentioned Stephen Hawking fairly often on Posthuman Blues. Although he didn't always agree with him, I'm fairly certain he would've had something (respectful) to say about his passing. At the same time, Hawking had been popping up a lot in the media in recent years - even on PMB (notably here and here) - so his was an unexpected loss.

Vale to Stephen Hawking, a truly amazing human.

For more information, there's the BBC article: Stephen Hawking: Visionary physicist dies aged 76; and an obituary from the NY Times, Stephen Hawking Dies at 76; His Mind Roamed the Cosmos. Other articles of note: Stephen Hawkings Six Wildest Predictions From 2017, an older link Mac had posted to PHB, Stephen Hawking: "Humans Have Entered a New Stage of Evolution", and, lastly, Stephen Hawking sampled on Pink Floyd’s The Endless River.

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A Smooth Exit from Eternal Inflation

"In his ‘no boundary theory’, devised with James Hartle in 1983, the pair described how the Earth hurtled into existence during the Big Bang. But the theory also predicted a multiverse meaning the phenomenon was accompanied by a number of other ‘Big Bangs’ creating separate universes.

In his final paper, Hawking and Mr Hertog – professor for theoretical psychics at KU Leuven University in Belgium – explored how these universes could be found using a probe on a spaceship. The paper – named A Smooth Exit from Eternal Inflation – also predicted how our universe would eventually fade into blackness as the stars run out of energy. Hertog told the Sunday Times: ‘He has often been nominated for the Nobel and should have won it. Now he never can.’

... Carlos Frenk, professor of cosmology at Durham University, agreed that it has previously been impossible to measure other universes. She said: ‘The intriguing idea in Hawking’s paper is that [the multiverse left its imprint on the background radiation permeating our universe and we could measure it with a detector on a spaceship.’"

- This update emerges from the Metro article (with the misleading title): Stephen Hawking predicted the end of the world in new research submitted before he died.