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Comment by mhsabbagh | Hacker News Reader

This is extremely misleading and fake news. 200 scientists from 40 countries participated in the project [1], not just this one. Saying that she's the one "behind the first black hole image" is clearly pushing for some propaganda, ignoring all other people work.

I have also seen countless tweets on Twitter that feature both her picture and Margaret Hamilton, saying that "The first one took us to Moon, and the second one showed us black holes", getting in total more than 1 million likes and retweets. Both are fake news and straightforward wrong.

[1]: https://erc.europa.eu/news/eu-funded-scientists-unveil-first...

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You're conflating two things. There is an EU project to observe and measure the environment around a black hole. It is a project involving 200 people going back many years - as is stated explicitly in the article you are commenting on.

Katie Bouman was the scientist in charge of the project of taking the enormous amount of data and translating that into an actual image. Not only does the article state that the larger project has 200 people working on it, Dr Bouman comments that her team deserves equal credit.

There is no problem with celebrating some of the leaders of projects. We all know Tim Berners Lee didn't single handedly install AOL into our houses but he's still known as the father of the internet because that's how media works - they publicize people who have been crucial in specific work. We don't need a conspiracy theory to explain this.

No I am not, in order to create the image they observed the black hole for years, which is coming from the work of the people I linked to in my source, 200 people from 40 countries and all the other astronomers, being the team who just produced the image from the data is relatively smaller effort comparing to the overall work of all the people involved for years. I am not blaming her, I didn't say she's the one pushing this thing, I am blaming this BBC article. She never said "I am the one".

Yes she was in charge of the team responsible of producing the image from the data, it doesn't mean in anyway that she's "behind the first image of the black hole". Everybody involved is behind the image.

This is not about celebrating those people, it's giving the main chunk of the credit to this person alone. I have no idea why is it such a hard thing to understand or why is this even an issue. Claiming that this person is the only "crucial" person involved is a straightforward lie. If that's how the media has been doing it for 30 years, then the media needs to change and fix their lies.

Yes, the same way that people credit elon musk for tesla, or credit elon musk for spaceX. He didnt build those rockets himself either.

> This is not about celebrating those people, it's giving the main chunk of the credit to this person alone.

Because leading a large team of researches working on highly complicated work is respectfull work as well. Another team leader might have botched it and we wouldnt have the picture.

Those are his companies, he founded them with his money. He's the CEO of all those companies, unlike the situation here. She wasn't the leader of the entire project. And she didn't even put her hands on the other aspects other than processing the image from the data.

> Another team leader might have botched it and we wouldnt have the picture.

How do you know that? The "might" means nothing here. There were many other teams working too and each of them have their talented leader doing complicated things. Choosing this one specifically from all others to take the credit is meaningless.

To me it seems pretty obvious to use the teamlead of the team actually producing the image.

Very few people are excited about "5TB of data of a black hole gathered".

> How do you know that? The "might" means nothing here.

It doesnt mean _nothing_. It means she did a good job, or at least good enough, for her team to actually produce the image.

How I know that some other team leader might have botched it? I would have.

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