Are We About To See A Black Hole?

"If there is one thing science is good for, it's going to extremes."

"A lot of science's history is just one story after another of people figuring out how to do something that, just a few years before, was thought to be impossible."

"The impossible was heavy on my mind last Wednesday as I found out just how close we were to seeing — as in taking actual pictures — of black holes."

"Charles Gammie is a computational astrophysicist. Like me, he uses supercomputers to simulate the behavior of fluids in space (i.e gases or plasmas). Unlike our group at the University of Rochester, however, Gammie's research group studies black holes and the spinning disks of gas that form around them. I consider him to be one of the best of my generation of computationalists. On top of that, he's also a really nice guy. It was during his visit last week that I learned just how far a project called the Event Horizon Telescope (or EHT) has gotten in the project of seeing black holes."