Caltech's Free Watson Lecture on Nov. 4: Katie Bouman on How Physics and AI Illuminate the Hidden Universe; Advance Registration Full, Standby Line Available
The California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, Los Angeles County, California, will present the next installment of its Earnest C. Watson Lecture Series on Wednesday, November 4, 2026, at 7:30 p.m. PT in Beckman Auditorium on the Caltech campus (1200 E. California Blvd., Pasadena). Professor Katie Bouman will speak on "Illuminating the Hidden Universe with Physics and AI." Admission is free, but advance registration is required — and Caltech says advance registration for this talk is already full. Guests without tickets are still welcome at the preshow, which begins at 6 p.m. with food, music, and interactive displays and requires no registration, and may join a standby line by 6:50 p.m. for any remaining seats. A recording of the talk will be posted on Caltech's YouTube channel afterward.
Bouman will explain how some of the most iconic images in modern science were never captured by a camera in the traditional sense: they were inferred from indirect and incomplete measurements, using a careful combination of physics, prior knowledge, and computation. Beginning with the story of black hole imaging — where confidence came not from a single image but from the consistency of features across many reconstructions of the same data — she will show how simple assumptions can take researchers far, where those assumptions begin to limit what can be learned, and how modern SI methods open richer possibilities while still respecting physical laws. The talk explores a broader shift in scientific imaging: as observation pushes further, images are increasingly constructed rather than simply captured, and understanding how they are made is essential to interpreting what they show.
Katie Bouman is a professor of computing and mathematical sciences, electrical engineering, and astronomy at Caltech, a Rosenberg Scholar, and a Heritage Medical Research Institute Investigator. Before joining Caltech she was a postdoctoral fellow with the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration, which published the first picture of a black hole in April 2019; her honors include the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, a Sloan Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, and a share of the Breakthrough Prize. The Watson Lectures have brought Caltech research to the public, free and open to all, for more than 100 years; the next lecture in the series, by microbiologist Sarkis Mazmanian on the gut microbiome-brain connection, is scheduled for December 2.
Source: GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：事件视界望远镜（Event Horizon Telescope）2019年发布的首张黑洞照片——室女座星系M87中心的超大质量黑洞，Katie Bouman 参与的团队正是用计算成像方法把全球望远镜的零散数据拼出这张图像。CC BY 4.0，来源：Wikimedia Commons（Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration）。Photo: The first-ever image of a black hole, the supermassive black hole at the center of galaxy M87, released by the Event Horizon Telescope in 2019; Katie Bouman's computational imaging work helped turn scattered telescope data into this picture. CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
