How Andrea Ghez won the Nobel for an experiment nobody thought would work

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-andrea-ghez-won-the-nobel-for-an-experiment-nobody-thought-would-work/

by bookofjoe • 6 years ago

200 41 6 years ago

ufmace• 6 years ago

I do not like this clickbait title. Just tell us what the experiment was. This seems designed to build a narrative about something rather than telling people about an interesting experiment.

sp332• 6 years ago

Well, it's what the article does, so I think that's a fine reason to have a title that promises that.

hn_throwaway_99• 6 years ago

Well, it's what the article does

Barely. I would have liked to know much more about the details of the experiment, but also why people were initially so skeptical, and what happened to make these people come around.

Causality1• 6 years ago

Seconding this. There's a grand total of two sentences vaguely describing what she wanted the instrument to do but zero information whatsoever about how that differed from its normal operation, why nobody thought it would work, or why it posed a risk to the instrument. This article is just a bunch of compliments toward Dr. Ghez.

netsharc• 6 years ago

Well duh, it's an article nicely applauding the person who just won a significant prize/recognition, if you wanted to find out more about the research you're sitting in front of a machine which can help you find that.

mhh__2• 6 years ago

Do you guys not read the article at all? How is it clickbait to describe what he did - the Nobel Prizes aren't that interesting as science goes (good science is good science from the day it was published until now), the human side is what draws many to an article like this.

There is the "Science is interesting, and if you disagree you can fuck off" approach, but why not give it some style.

neonate• 6 years ago

Not a 'he'.

gameswithgo• 6 years ago

part of getting things done, in science or business or sport or art, is being able to convince people to do the things that need doing.

there is usually a social / political aspect that has to be managed.

kinkrtyavimoodh• 6 years ago

The article is written like an 'in memoriam', except that Dr Ghez is actually alive.

Here's what the clickbait headline was referring to—

"NIRC [Near Infrared Camera at Keck Observatory] was never designed to do what Andrea needed—an ultrafast readout of images and then a restacking of the result to remove the effects of the atmosphere’s turbulence. But she was not to be denied—and we made the changes. And it worked!"

faitswulff3• 6 years ago

Tangential, but I was surprised that the article kept referring to her as “Andrea” instead of Dr. Ghez until the end where the author stated that they’re friends. From that perspective the author likely meant for it to have a warm, friendly tone. At the same time, given its publication for a wider audience and the occasion, it is perhaps more fitting to refer to Dr. Ghez more formally.

oska2• 6 years ago

She might prefer being called by her first name and perhaps doesn't even like formal address. We don't know and if she isn't complaining about it then I don't know if we should.

antognini2• 6 years ago

Back when I was in grad school Andreas Ghez gave a colloquium talk about her work in my department. The basic idea behind the technique she used is that the resolution from images in modern telescopes is limited by atmospheric distortions. If you can get rid of the distortions, you can get much sharper images, and in her case, resolve the stars orbiting Sag A*.

Adaptive optics is one way to reduce distortions from the atmopshere. With adaptive optics, you observe some star (or more commonly a spot of light created by a laser) and rapidly distort one of the mirrors in the optical path to compensate for atmospheric fluctuations.

Andrea Ghez went further than this, though. Atmospheric fluctuations are fast, but they are not instantaneous. If you can take an observation faster than the atmosphere changes, you will get a much sharper image. You can sort of imagine that an any given instant, a star is a very sharp point of light (or actually several points of light due to refraction), but over time, these points of light move around randomly over an area to create a smeared out image.

Of course, there a number of huge technical difficulties to taking these very rapid images. But if you can manage it, you can resolve the orbits of stars around the supermassive black hole at the center of the Galaxy. (This technique is called speckle imaging.)

I also remember her joking that when most astronomers write observing proposals, they'll typically apply for a few nights of time on a telescope. But she was applying for a few seconds of observing time over the course of a decade.

antognini2• 6 years ago

And I made a bad typo: "Andreas" should be "Andrea" the first time I mentioned her name.

jacquesm• 6 years ago

Sports photographers have known this for quite a while.

bobbylarrybobby• 6 years ago

Yes, I think this was more of an engineering problem than a physics problem. Building telescopes with enough sensitivity to be able to resolve a star ~100k light years away, and the necessary software to process their raw data, is no small feat.

m463• 6 years ago

Wow, this is quite fascinating - especially in comparison to the story of Robert Williams and the hubble deep field image.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Williams_(astronomer)

ecommerceguy2• 6 years ago

Maybe with this spooky satellites will actually be able to read license plate numbers on cars. Grrrreeeaaaaattttt.

goku99• 6 years ago

Hey man.... your text is really really light. Could you please darken it? how did you do that? make it bold or something, my eyes hurt.

saagarjha• 6 years ago

That depends on the quality of your comment.

tsimionescu• 6 years ago

That is how Hacker News marks down voted comments - the more downvotes, the lighter the gray.

PhantomGremlin• 6 years ago

In the comment head, click on the time submitted (it's actually a link), just after the author. For example "9 hours ago". You will be taken to a readable version of any downvoted comment.

This trick only works if you're logged in.

OnACoffeeBreak2• 6 years ago

Andrea is fond of pointing out that one of the reasons for her success has been this tight and rapid loop between the needs of the astronomers and the engineers who respond to the challenge.

As an engineer I always had this fantasy that it would be super cool to do engineering at a place like this or (specific to my fantasy) CERN. As a product engineer I would like to think that making something one-of--engineering for engineers and scientists-- would allow me to focus on just getting the thing to work in one specific setting. No dealing with longevity or RMA or other similar constraints.

I guess it's a fantasy about practicing "pure" engineering and design.

I call it a fantasy because I'm not convinced that that is how it would play out in the real world. I would love to hear from anyone familiar with this field.

Gauntleteer4• 6 years ago

I work for Keck as a software engineer. What do you want to know? It's not all upside, working for pure science like this. We like to "fly the prototype", so to speak. Despite the challenges of it being a 25 year old pair of telescopes that are constantly climbing the far wall of the bathtub curve, it's a damn cool place to work at.

OnACoffeeBreak2• 6 years ago

What do I way to know, eh? I guess the real thing I would like to know is how your job is different from product development for the public. I very much realize that it's an open ended question and is not answerable unless you've had experience doing what I do.

That said, here are some concrete questions. Do your projects get cancelled regularly for reasons other than engineering merrit? Do you get into a mode where you have to maintain projects that are "past their prime"? This one might be weird, but do you feel needed, as in do you feel like your contribution matters?

While I am asking these I realize that my fantasy bubble is busting and that maybe project requirements and management might not be that much different in our worlds, but I'd rather hear from someone in that world.

mng2• 6 years ago

I have done instrumentation work in US HEP. It is fun to do stuff nobody else (or very few) people are doing, in labs with very cool stuff, working with extremely smart people.

However there will be a few extremely smart jerks, and leadership seems to spend a lot of time applying/fighting for funding. I definitely got the sense that there was a pecking order. The PhDs are at the top, engineers and technicians don't get as much respect. Also in these days I hear that US national labs are moving to a more "flexible" model. In days past an engineer might be assigned to an experiment for the duration, but now leadership wants to be able to assign resources on a more fine-grained basis. (Though I think this is becoming more the case in industry too.)

All that said, if I was in a position to not mind a pay cut, I'd definitely consider going back to pure research.

jasonwatkinspdx• 6 years ago

I'm acquainted with someone that has a job that sounds like what you want. He's at a smaller university, runs a small machine shop, and mostly spends his time trying to creatively fab together whatever the science departments want constructed.

etrautmann• 6 years ago

I’m a neuroscience PhD and this is the majority of what I end up working on. Large one-off systems engineering projects to enable new instrumentation for performing new types of experiments. It’s good fun, but there’s always a tension between doing something fast or right, and tape somehow always sneaks into the final product.

ngcc_hk• 6 years ago

Need more context why it considered it is a waste of time and how she overcame what would make a great story. Instead just apple shining. Sigh. Should be a great story like the one why he kill Pluto.

Something like the first comment here but more. Even the infrared one would be a good story.

zmix• 6 years ago

Interesting! I always thought, it would be just logical, that at the center of (at least) a spiral galaxy a black hole must reside, since it looks just like water draining down into the kitchen sink. But for science, obviously, obvious is not enough. It must be proven.

labster• 6 years ago

Obvious is a hypothesis. Obvious with supporting evidence is a theory.

jakeva• 6 years ago

What makes obvious a law?

How Andrea Ghez won the Nobel for an experiment nobody thought would work

Related Stories