Event Horizon Telescope

The canonical Blind Replication Sprint. The four-team blind imaging protocol, the October 2017 EHT Image Hackathon, the seven-week 2018 sprint, the July 2018 convergence workshop reveal, and the 2019 Bouman credit-attribution episode as a named storytelling failure mode.

DraftPrinciple 9 · Convergence as proofLast updated 2026-05-03

The Event Horizon Telescope is the canonical worked example of the Blind Replication Sprint format archetype. The October 2017 EHT Image Hackathon at the Black Hole Initiative — labeled directly on screen as such in Peter Galison's documentary record of the collaboration — established the four-team blind imaging protocol that produced the first image of M87*. The seven-week 2018 sprint that produced the M87* image paired CLEAN-based pipelines for the Americas and Global teams against Regularized Maximum Likelihood pipelines for the East Asia and Cross Atlantic teams, and converged at the July 2018 BHI workshop on a result that agreed across teams to better than 95% pixel-to-pixel correlation. Full case study queued for post-launch publication; the Manifesto principles below cover the structural argument the case will operationalize.

Structural analysis

Pending. The full case study will cover the four-team blind imaging protocol, the institutional-scale prerequisites, convergence as integrity mechanic, the dramaturgy of the convergence event, and the 2019 Bouman credit-attribution episode as the canonical storytelling failure mode of convergence-based work operating outside the collaboration.

What worked

Pending.

What didn't

Pending.

Principles this case illustrates