Passion for Science

[Markus Hanke]

When the new EHT image appears on screen for the first time, astrophysicists be like...

 

[geordief]

7 minutes ago, Markus Hanke said:

When the new EHT image appears on screen for the first time, astrophysicists be like...

 

Not sure how young she is .I wonder does she remember a time ,as I do  when Black Holes  were not even believed to exist.(well I think that is my memory -it is hard to remember a "non memory")

 

I think they were talked about but were not considered to be likely to actually exist..

[MigL]

When you see the results of months, if not years, of work, to achieve something that most thought was impossible, you just can't help getting excited.

[joigus]

Only true knowledge brings you true emotion. So I understand. Other people experience it with less of an outpour, but every bit as intense and authentic.

[beecee]

6 hours ago, geordief said:

I think they were talked about but were not considered to be likely to actually exist..

The first BH candidate was Cygnus X-1. Simply put, one would need to be able to describe the observed action of the accretion disk associated with it, and the fact that matter was appearing to disappear into nothing....BH, or a gravitationally completely collapsed object was the best scientific theory we could have. Considering that a BH of sorts was also possible under Newtonian mechanics, called a Dark Star and proposed in the late 1700's by a bloke called John Michell.

3 hours ago, MigL said:

When you see the results of months, if not years, of work, to achieve something that most thought was impossible, you just can't help getting excited.

Jocylin Russell and her little green men!

Edited May 16, 2022 by beecee

[swansont]

If you're lucky as a scientist you get to have a few of these "Eureka!" or "It is alive!" moments.

I had one - I was the first person to see fluorescence from radioactive K-37 and our lab was the first to magneto-optically trap it. It was, AFAIK, the shortest half-life atom ever trapped (about 1.25 s), a record that we broke a short time later when we trapped K-38m, which has a half-life just under a second. (I don't know if anyone has broken that record)

But just figuring things out, getting past some issue that's stumped you - are these moments on a much smaller scale. There are always roadblocks in experimental physics (and, I imagine, other sciences) that you have to figure out. As my thesis advisor put it (when I felt stupid for not getting a result quickly because of a roadblock) "If we knew the answer it wouldn't be research"

 

 

[dimreepr]

That "Eureka!" moment is oh so sweet and not limited to science; the problem is, so few, if any, of our contemporaries understand "the joke"...