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17 April 2019

Oh boy, have we gotten some BIG news. I’m assuming everyone’s heard about the BLACK HOLE PICTURE.

But now, collider updates, because I’ll get yelled at if I don’t write something about it.

We’ve got most of the left-side halo magnets off the power grid. We had a bit of an issue with a few of the stabilizer cylinders not sliding back because the tracks were bent (they’re all supposed to slide back into the building structure to give us access to the main magnets, plus the cone where the particles accelerate are halfway underneath them - see hasty diagram here), so we had to manually move two of them (well, I moved one of them, and the crane crew I mentioned last time decided they’d go ahead and move the other before I could fucking get to it). Anyway, after that unexpected quench back in February, we’ve had to be a lot more careful in case one of them accidentally quenches again and/or the cryogenic helium gets vented inappropriately, since that shit’s a breathing hazard.

Anyway, FUCKING BLACK HOLES! Humans have got a PICTURE of a BLACK HOLE now, folks, and first data analyses show that so far, the equations, the theories of relativity, the current simulated models of black holes… They’re RIGHT.

“But wait, Liv, it’s a BLACK HOLE! It sucks in even light, you can’t take a picture of it!”

WRONG, you can still get a picture of the weird and wacky shit that it affects around it! And when you look at it…

HUMANS. WERE. FUCKING. RIGHT.

Do you even KNOW do you even have ANY CLUE WHATSOEVER how many scientific theories, postulates, ideas, concepts, tenets this validates? We have visual confirmation that yes, this is how the universe WORKS.

Black holes and gravity are still kind of “?????” bits of science, especially the whole macro/quantum divide. We still don’t have a good quantum theory of gravity that works, which is INFURIATING AS ALL HELL, but anyway.

Did you know that picture isn’t even from one telescope? It’s from a network of telescopes that combined to form a PLANET-SIZED telescope.

And then you’ve got the software, which sorted through and compiled all that ridiculous amounts of data. Interferometry is some ugly shit. You’re basically trying to piece together a whole picture with only tiny bits, except you also have to teach a computer how to do that, because you can’t process petabytes of data with your little squishy wetware brain.

Technically, that photo is also 55 million years old. It takes 55 million years for the light from that black hole to reach us. That’s one of the oldest photos in history and us humans only just took it less than a month ago.

Science is so fucking cool.

Footnotes: Well, I succeeded in finding a new job, thank heavens. I think I’m also starting to fall into that pit of “taking on too many projects,” but y’know, we’ll see where it goes. I tell myself that every time, AND YET, here we are.

Anyway, continuity: see here for info on the magnet quench event.

Science: Again, I’m not ACTUALLY a physicist, I’m just hobbyist, and all the info about Liv’s collider has no guarantee of being accurate! The black hole picture was compiled by the Event Horizon Telescope team. Some more details on it can be found here. The whole project is incredibly impressive. (Also, if anyone does actually think Katie Bouman - the woman who became the “face” of the black hole image discovery - is “taking credit” for others’ work or something, this is a spectacular - and well-cited! - post about it.) And… Interferometry is pretty cool, but the computer science behind it is some YIKES-level stuff, in my opinion. This is a fairly good video on how it works, but you need to read the description too or it won’t make sense!