Let no man deceive himself. If any man among you seemeth to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise.
(1 Corinthians 3:18) NKJV
Before you choke with indignation about our stupidity because we’re apparently unaware that there are photographs of a black hole, let’s bring up the issue of epistemology. What is knowledge?
Black holes were first devised as a mathematical contrivance needed to account for the missing mass of the universe. The concept allows the popular science paradigm (SciPop) to boldly go where no one had gone before, put a band aid on a cosmological model which is physically impossible, and laugh all the way to the Nobel prize award ceremony.
Black holes are paradigm-dependent, which is to say that the condition which they’re required to be the solution to only exists once you’ve accepted the premise of the SciPop paradigm. If they’re paradigm-dependent then they can’t be facts, because a fact is something which will be the same regardless of what paradigm you believe.
It took over 65,000 lines of code to produce this image. With that much code you could generate the same image from the last 10 years of McDonald’s accounting data.
Now, what happens when the next generation of Trekkie scientists proudly proclaim that they’ve taken photos of a black hole? We don’t worry about it, it’s circumstantial evidence. Their rationalization of what ever the photograph captured is also paradigm-dependent. In Matty’s Paradigm the image of M87* can be rationalized to be of a piece of onyx glass 11 feet wide at a distance of 17,364 light years.
Matty (Headwind) 