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Picture Perfect

I have been struggling with my lack of excitement of the first ever picture of the black-hole which recently whipped up the media into a frenzy. The layperson's explanation of what was done to produce the image was so over-simplified that it was lame. It was akin to saying if you are staring at the pixelated image of a dog's face and you see a pixel of certain color you can approximately guess what the colors of the surrounding pixels might be based on the location of the first pixel. That is sort of what was done to produce the said picture of the black-hole. Maybe the way this was all explained for the benefit of the stupid average person with no more than tenth grade level physics and math, made it sound like not a very big deal. There was the insinuation that any deeper explanation would be above our pay-grade - the presumption of limited mental abilities.

But again, say the pundits made an effort to explain the math in a way that was understandable to the average person, would they get why this was a such a spectacular achievement.  That is assuming, they even got the math based explanation in the first place. There was an expectation that us uneducated masses would be in awe of theoretical physicists, mathematicians are other specialists who get this stuff and know how to produce such images and validate the output of work only they can understand. It seems like there are others like me struggling to muster up excitement about this thing. I sure am glad not to be alone and weird this way.

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