The Internet goes black hole on Katie Bouman

I’m by no means a science buff. I keep a vague eye on breakthrough news, but I don’t live for it, and seldom get too excited about it. But it was hard last week not to get at least a tiny bit caught up in the first photograph of a black hole.

Not that I know all that much about black holes. If I thought about them, I’d probably be a little scaredy. (As a metaphor, however, it’s hard to come up with anything better, that’s for sure. So I use the term frequently.)

The best aspect of the photograph – other than the image itself – was that a woman scientist played a key role in making it possible.

There aren’t a lot of women scientists at Katie Bouman’s level. She got her PhD from MIT, has been doing a post-doc with the Event Horizon Telescope (which was set up 25 years ago to capture a picture of the black hole), and is about to start teaching at Cal Tech. So she’s got great credentials.

It was Bouman who was instrumental in creating the algorithm that let the Event Horizon Telescope to at long last capture the first image of black hole.

There is another iconic picture associated with this event, and that’s the picture of Katie Bouman’s reaction when she realized what had happened.

Who could resist?

Sweet-looking young nerd girl. MIT-CalTech wonk. STEM hero in the making.

As excitedly as the geek-Internet went gaga over the first photograph of the black hole, it began going nuts about Katie Bouman. The Internet being the Internet, all of a sudden, Twitter was full of effusive tweets that might lead one to believe that Bouman (who for the most part isn’t on social media) had sole responsibility for this breakthrough, rather than playing a critical role as one of many equally brilliant scientists associated with the project. Bouman herself immediately jumped in on Facebook and acknowledged this.

“No one algorithm or person made this image,” she wrote. “It required the amazing talent of a team of scientists from around the globe and years of hard work to develop the instrument, data processing, imaging methods, and analysis techniques that were necessary to pull off this seemingly impossible feat.” (Source: The Atlantic)

There had been a bit of lightish pushback from Bouman’s colleagues on the project, pointing out that this was a joint effort. But the Internet being the Internet (and incels being incels), Katie Bouman just had to be smacked down. So:

…within hours, another strain of interpretation started metastasizing. Memes and videos across Reddit, Twitter, YouTube, and other platforms called Bouman a fraud and “debunked” her contributions to the discovery.

These were not “shared success” interpretations. They were “Katie Bouman had nothing to do with it” stories. Instead, “they” (“it”?) were claiming that one of her collaborators had written the algorithm.

The colleague, Andrew Chael, defended Bouman. None of the claims was true, he tweeted. “If you are congratulating me because you have a sexist vendetta against Katie, please go away,” he added. It’s difficult to imagine internet sleuths digging for proof of dishonesty if the poster child of the black-hole discovery had looked like Chael. (Chael, in an interview with The Washington Post, called it “ironic” that his new fans chose him, a gay astronomer, as their hero.)

Well, good for Andrew Chael.

But the Internet being the Internet, things got even worse:

Dozens of accounts (some now deleted) appeared on Instagram and Twitter bearing Bouman’s name and picture. None of them, her colleagues said, was real.

These were, of course, take down accounts, promoting the take that Bouman was part of a politically correct, diversity conspiracy to deprive a (white) man of his rightful place.

Saying that she was part of a larger team doesn’t diminish her work, or minimize her involvement in what is already a history-making project. Highlighting the achievements of a brilliant, enthusiastic scientist does not diminish the contributions of the other 214 people who worked on the project, either. But what it is doing is showing a different model for a scientist than the one most of us grew up with. That might mean a lot to some kids — maybe kids who look like her — making them excited about studying the wonders of the Universe. (Source: The Verge)

Amen to that!

During my many years in the tech world, I worked with many brilliant software engineers. Most of them were men. The few female core systems software engineers were equally brilliant, but there weren’t all that many of them. (The two I can think of were both MIT grads. Yay, Massachusetts Institute of Technology!)

I don’t know what keeps women from entering STEM professions in better numbers. I mean, it’s been a couple of decades since Mattel’s Talking Barbie was bitching about how tough math is.

But it sure is a shame when the forces of the dark can’t stand any attention being paid to an accomplished woman computer scientist. These trolls should just go back to whatever hole they emerged from.

I’m guessing that Katie Bouman is going to have a truly kick-arse career. Which is a lot more than you can say for those trolls.