How Beauty Leads Physics Astray

Sabine Hossenfelder is probably doing a "book tour", since this talk certainly addressed many points that she brought up in her book.



As I've said many times on here, I don't disagree with many things that she brought up. I find the trend of foundational physics to even think about discarding experimental verification to be very troubling. I'm just glad that the field that I'm in is still strongly experimental.

Zz.

First Images of a Black Hole

After a week of rumors and build-up, the news finally broke and it is what we have been expecting. It is the announcement that we finally have our first image of a black hole.

The first direct visual evidence of a black hole and its “shadow” has been revealed today by astronomers working on the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). The image is of the supermassive black hole that lies at the centre of the huge Messier 87 galaxy, in the Virgo galaxy cluster. Located 55 million light-years from Earth, the black hole has been determined to have a mass 6.5-billion times that of the Sun, with an uncertainty of 0.7 billion solar masses.

You can actually read the papers that were published related to this announcement, so you can find a lot more details there.

Well done, folks!!

Zz.