Andrew Strominger

So you can go there a thousand times wearing different clothes, but each time there will be the same relation between the subsequent images.

And that is how we're gonna learn about the black holes.

We're gonna take the stuff that is swirling around and we're gonna tease out the subsequent images and look at their relation.

And there's some very beautiful, really beautiful mathematics, which we were surprised to realize with the volumes and volumes of,

papers on black holes and their properties, this particular, because it was a physical question that had never been asked in exactly this way.

Photons that are orbiting.

So the photon ring-

are the photons that orbit around.

The geometry, the spin, and you can verify things behaving, you know, we have never seen

a region of space-time with such high curvature.

I mean, the region around a black hole is crazy.

It's not like in this room.

The curvature is everything, you know?

Yeah, I'm able to imagine that kind of thing, yeah.

So for example, and actually there's a wonderful movie, Interstellar.

And in that movie, you know, Kip Thorne, of course, is a great theoretical physicist, experimental, who later won the Nobel Prize for LIGO.

And that movie is very accurate, scientifically.

There's some funny statements in there that of the 100 million people who saw that movie, there can't be more than 10 or 20 understood about why Matthew McConaughey is ejecting the trash in a certain direction.

For example, if I were a spinning black hole right here, if I was spinning fast enough, you wouldn't be able to stay still there.

you'd have to be orbiting around like that, you know?