Charles Liu

Some of the giants of our field are remembered for their legacy of making these maps happen.

The problem with using an AI…

to try to make those maps is that you have to have the AI interpret just as the question was saying.

How do you tell the difference between what dust is causing and what the light is causing from behind it?

AI isn't sophisticated enough to tell that difference yet.

It just sort of chooses the best option and sticks it in.

So there's that human need to be able to disentangle these two effects, which something like a large language model is still not quite able to do.

So AI eventually will be extremely helpful in refining maps.

that we had found a long time ago and used optimal methods to figure out what they were.

But they won't be able to make maps on their own because they don't have the decision-making capability yet that distinguish between the different things that are causing what we think dust might be causing.

Get out of that one, Charles.

It turns out that we don't have to get out of that one because the universe got out of that one for us.

When the universe was the pinhole sized, it actually wasn't that massive.

We think of the Big Bang or think about the Big Bang as rolling back the history of the universe and making it smaller and smaller and smaller.

But at the moment of the Big Bang, the mass of the universe was, well, at 10 to the minus 43 second after the Big Bang, we'll call that the Planck time, the mass of the universe was less than a glass of water.

And it's actually not enough to have turned it into a black hole at that time.

Something further happened to inject the universe with so much energy that that inflation happened that you probably have heard of where at nearly the beginning universe, you wind up inflating the universe beyond its regular expansion rate by factors of many, many trillions.

And then you wind up with all this extra energy in there, which then

condenses into matter and becomes the galaxies and stars and planets and black holes that we have today.

So there was a period of time early on where black holes didn't even do.