Director’s Statement
I began filming Black Holes | The Edge of All We Know in the spring of 2016, when five colleagues and I launched the Black Hole Initiative, an interdisciplinary center for the study of black holes. Unlike the many fascinating objects in the sky, black holes have come to be central not only to astronomy, but also to mathematics, physics, and philosophy—not to speak of the way they figure in science fiction, in the art world, and in everyday speech. Two of those co-founders (both key figures in the film) are Sheperd Doeleman, the first director of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), and Andy Strominger, a long-time collaborator with Stephen Hawking.
By April 2016, I had begun working as a physicist/philosopher with the EHT— Alongside the scientific work, during the following years, I filmed what became the first of the three strands of Edge: the EHT’s struggle to make the first image of a black hole. The resulting image was released on 10 April 2019 and seen in the following forty-eight hours by several billion people: the most-viewed scientific image in history. Also from 2016-19, I filmed a parallel effort by Hawking and colleagues, as they undertook to make sense of the (theoretical) threat that black holes pose to the very idea of universal physical law. Finally, philosophers reflect on these most mysterious objects: Is knowledge of the interior of a black hole even to be counted as real?
Edge weaves these strands (observation, theory, and philosophy) together, all around the theme of what it is possible to know of these darkest, most elusive and mysterious edges of space and time. Visualizing these efforts was not only part of the science itself, but also a challenge for filmmaking; in addition to verité, I brought in a wide range of simulations, but also 2D black and white expressive animation, graphic novel sequences, and physical models. The goal of the film is not just to popularize already-achieved science results—it is to bring the audience into the all-too human conduct of science, the dynamics of collaboration, the challenges of observing and theorizing, the tantalizing clues to space and time that can be garnered in the making of science at the absolute forefront of what we can understand.
— Peter Galison
short credits
Director/Producer
Peter Galison
Editor/Co-Producer
Chyld King
In Association with Sandbox Films
Executive Producers
Greg Boustead, Jessica Harrop
Music
Zoë Keating
Cinematographers
Stephen McCarthy, Allie Humenuk, Tim Cragg
Animators
Ruth Lingford, Momentist, Inc., Warning Office, Glynnis Fawkes
With Support from the John Templeton Foundation, Sandbox Films, Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program, with support from Science Sandbox, the Office of the Vice Provost for Research, Harvard University, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
About the Filmmakers
Director and Producer Peter Galison
Peter Galison is a physicist, historian of science, and filmmaker at Harvard University, where he is the Joseph Pellegrino University Professor. In 1997, he was named a MacArthur Fellow; in 2017 he won the American Physical Society’s Abraham Pais Prize; and with his Event Horizon Telescope colleagues, Galison shared in the 2020 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for the first image of a black hole. He is the author of several books, including How Experiments End; Image and Logic: A Material History of Microphysics; Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps; and (with L. Daston) Objectivity. Galison partnered (as dramaturg) with South African artist William Kentridge on a multi-screen installation, “The Refusal of Time” (2012) and an associated chamber opera. His documentary film (with Pamela Hogan, 2000) probed the moral-political debates over the H-bomb: Ultimate Weapon: The H-bomb Dilemma. He and Robb Moss co-directed Secrecy (2008), on national security secrecy, which premiered at Sundance. The two also co-directed Containment, (2015), about the need to guard radioactive materials and warn the 10,000-year future. Galison’s current film, to be released in 2020, is on black holes: “The Edge of All We Know.”
Editor and Co-Producer Chyld King
Chyld King is editor and co-producer of Black Holes | The Edge of All We Know and is based in Boston, MA. He previously edited and co-produced Robb Moss and Galison’s films Containment (2015), and Secrecy (2008), which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Chyld has served as an advisor for the Sundance Documentary Edit Lab and has consulted on multiple documentary projects. In the 2000's, he worked for several years with filmmaker Errol Morris, and was one of the editors of Morris’ Academy Award winning film The Fog of War. He has cut documentary projects for film and television, including episodes of God in America for PBS, American Experience’s film The Amish, and other projects that have aired on networks such as PBS, IFC, and Bravo.
