Katie Bouman — Physics, AI, and the Hidden Universe
The scientist who imaged a black hole explores how physics and AI are revealing cosmic structures beyond human perception.
Why we picked this
The scientist behind the first-ever black hole image explains how AI is helping us see things the universe never intended us to see. Free at Caltech.
Katie Bouman led the team that produced the first image of a black hole in 2019 — one of the most iconic scientific images of the century. The challenge wasn’t just pointing a telescope at the right spot. It required inventing entirely new computational methods to reconstruct an image from data collected by radio telescopes spanning the globe.
Now an associate professor at Caltech, Bouman is pushing further into the intersection of physics and artificial intelligence, developing techniques that reveal cosmic structures beyond what any single instrument can observe. At Beckman Auditorium, she’ll explain how these methods work and what they’re showing us about the hidden architecture of the universe. Free and open to the public.