![]() ![]() But the reaction to Bouman seems specific to this particular cultural moment, in which divergent views of gender, media, and science, usually flowing in their own little streams, smash together to form a massive riptide. In many ways, this is an old story: A successful woman becomes a target of harassment online because she’s a successful woman. None of them, her colleagues said, was real. In the midst of all that, something strange started happening: Dozens of accounts (some now deleted) appeared on Instagram and Twitter bearing Bouman’s name and picture. Memes and videos across Reddit, Twitter, YouTube, and other platforms called Bouman a fraud and “debunked” her contributions to the discovery. ![]() She was a symbol of female empowerment, a shatterer of STEM ceilings, a badass.īut within hours, another strain of interpretation started metastasizing. A round of stories celebrated Bouman’s work on the algorithms that forged a mesmerizing photograph from a vat of telescope data. Her face, slightly blurry but beaming, was everywhere.Īt first, the message was simple-Bouman stood out as a role model for young women and girls working in or aspiring to jobs in male-dominated science fields. After astronomers released that image last week, Bouman’s spread across the internet just as rapidly, on social media and in news stories. This researcher, Katie Bouman, was a postdoctoral fellow at MIT and a member of the team running Event Horizon Telescope, the effort to capture visual evidence of a black hole for the first time. Then, in the celebration that followed, another image emerged: a young computer scientist, hands over her mouth and eyes flashing with giddiness, as the image of the most mysterious object in the universe rendered on the computer screen in front of her. First, there was the first-ever look at a black hole, a shadowy void encircled in a fiery ring of cosmic matter. Two photos-one long anticipated, the other a surprise-became instantly famous in astronomy last week. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |