For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about the continuing breakthroughs of the black hole imaging Event Horizon Telescope.
On April 10, 2019 front pages and homepages around the world featured a black-and-orange picture of a blurred ring, dark at the center and bulging slightly at the bottom — the first-ever direct image of a black hole. The picture was the result of an unprecedented scientific collaboration, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), involving more than 300 researchers working on six continents. Now a new feature-length film, Black Holes: The Edge of All We Know, weaves together the story behind the groundbreaking image with other recent developments in black hole science, including the collaboration that resulted in Stephen Hawking’s final scientific paper.
The film was directed by Peter Galison, a historian and philosopher of science, physicist, filmmaker and co-principal-investigator at Harvard’s Black Hole Initiative (BHI). Galison began filming in 2016, the year the BHI launched, supported by $7.2 million in funding from the John Templeton Foundation. Galison and his team’s cameras were present to capture key moments in several BHI projects, including the gathering and analysis of the data that led to the creation of the famous black hole image.