I just saw this on Netflix and I regret not catching it earlier. It was produced in 2020 to take advantage of the huge publicity surrounding the first imaging of a black hole, but to get right to the point, it's excellent. It's one of the very best documentaries out there showing what the process of DOING science is actually like. (Full disclosure, I'm a scientist and I have tremendous respect for what director Peter Galison and the producers decided to show and emphasize in this film.) It's real. The Event Horizon Telescope wasn't the name for a 'thing' -- some single instrument sitting on a mountaintop -- it was the name for a team and its decade-long project involving an incredible path through data analysis pushed to the limit, computer programming, theoretical simulations, and pure thought.
There are a few principal scientists, like the various team leaders, who appear throughout the story and bookend things. But the more lasting impression -- and the correct one! -- is with all the team members and how they worked. The EHT wasn't the work of a single solitary Einstein. It was the combination of science and engineering project managers, sharp young programmers, sage leading scientists with the Big Picture in mind, blackboard theorists, and everything in between. Some of the most enjoyable bits are at the end when the various sub-teams finally get together to compare their results, debate about how to get the material out, and just hang out. Human beings are essentially tribal at a very deep level, and it's fun to see all of these folks with their tribe. I've been in meetings just like this. Science is social! It's people at work, and also at play.
Any young person excited by science and thinking about getting into it should see this film.
There are a few principal scientists, like the various team leaders, who appear throughout the story and bookend things. But the more lasting impression -- and the correct one! -- is with all the team members and how they worked. The EHT wasn't the work of a single solitary Einstein. It was the combination of science and engineering project managers, sharp young programmers, sage leading scientists with the Big Picture in mind, blackboard theorists, and everything in between. Some of the most enjoyable bits are at the end when the various sub-teams finally get together to compare their results, debate about how to get the material out, and just hang out. Human beings are essentially tribal at a very deep level, and it's fun to see all of these folks with their tribe. I've been in meetings just like this. Science is social! It's people at work, and also at play.
Any young person excited by science and thinking about getting into it should see this film.