What Is the Photon Ring?

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A black hole is like a hall of mirrors. If you shine a light on your face, bounce off your face, the photon can go off and head towards the black hole that will just fall in. But if it just misses it, it will boomerang around the back and come back to you. You'll actually see an infinite number of images of yourself if you had perfect resolution while looking at a black hole. This is extremely interesting for understanding and measuring the laws of physics because we don't know much about what that swirling disk is made of. The members of the Event Horizon Telescope are very keen to learn to see properties of curved space time.

Quantum gravity research is inspired by experiment — all of the experimental data that supports quantum mechanics, and supports general relativity — but it’s only inspiration, not detailed guidance. So it’s easy to “do research on quantum gravity” and get lost in a world of toy models and mathematical abstraction. Today’s guest, Andrew Strominger, is a leading researcher in string theory and quantum gravity, and one who has always kept his eyes on the prize: connecting to the real world. We talk about the development of string theory, the puzzle of a positive cosmological constant, and how black holes and string theory can teach us about each other.

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Andrew Strominger received his Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is currently the Gwill E. York Professor of Physics at Harvard University. Among his awards are the Dirac Medal, the Klein Medal, the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

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