Black Hole Inspiration - Just Keep Trying
I’ll admit, I struggled this morning to find a topic that motivated me. Frustrated, I grabbed my cup of coffee and sat down to read the local news, hoping to find something inspiring there. No luck, I jumped over to national news and, after a bit of scrolling, a few articles popped up about the Black Hole being photographed.
I’ve read quite a few articles already about this, but I figured I might as well read one again. While scrolling through it, a thought occurred to me. You don’t see many positive discoveries today.
This last week I had been researching women in history, and how they impacted history, and was intrigued to see the booms throughout history where pods of women explored, invented and discovered things. You don’t see a ton of that today, at least not to the extent that history tells us.
With that thought in mind, the news article became a lot more inspiring.
Katie Bouman is a grad student who, using Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, was able to provide his theory by taking a picture of the black hole. She developed an algorithm that was critical in filling in gaps that interferometry, a technique used by telescopes to collect millions of gigabytes of data, left.
This was motivational to me on a few levels.
Katie is a grad student. She’s not a well accomplished, well seasoned scientist or astronomer, she is a grad student. If that doesn’t scream motivation to the average person I don’t know what does.
In a world where everything feels like it’s already been discovered, documented, analyzed and pushed aside she managed to do something new. She was critical in taking the first pictures of a black hole. (Which, I’ll admit, I didn’t realize that the pictures of black holes I was shown as a kid in school were just educated guesses as to what they looked like…)
The pure joy on her face when the first images were shown. Take a moment to click here and see what I’m talking about. Her face doesn’t display arrogance, it displays a kid-like excitement and wonder.
Rereading this article not only helped inspire me to write a blog post this morning, but it inspired me that there are still wonders in the world. Chances are that I won’t discover something as epic as an algorithm enabling a picture of a black hole to be seen, but I can discover things new to me. Much of the world has already been discovered, but most of my world is still waiting to be discovered.
