Andrew Strominger

And there are some fairly concrete ideas about how to do that, but they're not universally accepted even within the stringy community.

Yes.

Well, they're both illusions.

Okay.

They're both illusions.

Even time.

So that was a paper with Dan Kopitz and Alex Lipsoska that just came out.

And this paper is kind of a wonderful example

of what happens when you start to talk to people who are, you know, way out of your comfort zone of no different stuff and look at the world a different way.

And some two or three years ago, I'm part of this group

the Black Hole Initiative, and I'm also part of this Event Horizon Telescope collaboration that took the famous, though I had nothing to do with the experiment, that took the famous picture of the donut of M87, and through conversations with them,

which started out in an effort to understand the image that they'd seen.

So it's a great thing for somebody like me, a theoretical physicist, lost, seemingly lost in string land, to be presented with an actual picture of a black hole.

And to be asked, what can we learn from this?

So, you know, with some help from, you know, Michael Johnson, Alex Lipsaska, and a bunch of other people at Venturized and Collaboration, we came up with a fantastic, beautiful answer using Einstein's theory.

that is both shaping the future of, now it is shaping the future of improved black hole photographs.

What do you want to concentrate on in the photograph?

You just point it at the sky and click?

No, you don't do that.

You optimize for various features.