n April 10, 2019, scientists produced the first image of a black hole, a century after Einstein’s work had implied the existence of such extraordinary objects. You didn’t need to know a lot of physics to be impressed by the image. The black hole it showed was some 55 million light-years distant from us and had a diameter about 3 million times that of the Earth. Like the famous “Earthrise” photograph taken by William Anders during the 1968 Apollo 8 mission, showing the Earth rising over the surface of the moon, the image of the black hole calls on us to assess our place in the universe, but the two photos pull us in different directions. “Earthrise” allowed us
