There is a TED talk by (actually, an interview with, as part of TED2019) Sheperd Doeleman, head of the EHT collaboration, whose transcript you can read on the TED website. It doesn’t say anything even slightly like that. Is there some other TED talk by her that you’re referring to? (I can’t find any evidence that there is another.)
The only other thing I can find that you conceivably might be referring to is a TEDx talk by Katie Bouman, from 2017 (before the EHT picture was produced). Her title is “How to take a picture of a black hole” and it includes a prediction of roughly what the picture might be expected to look like, and includes the words “my role in helping to take the first image of a black hole is to design algorithms that find the most reasonable image that also fits the telescope measurements”. Maybe that’s what you mean?
She doesn’t say “exactly”, or even approximately, that applying the same pipeline to random input would generate a similar result. Quite the reverse; let me quote her again. “What would happen if Einstein’s theories didn’t hold? We’d still want to reconstruct an accurate picture of what was going on. If we bake Einstein’s equations too much into our algorithms, we’ll just end up seeing what we expect to see. In other words, we want to leave the option open for there being a giant elephant at the centre of our galaxy.” She says, in other words, that a key consideration in their work was not doing exactly what you say she said they did.
(Shortly after that bit there is a slide that, if wilfully misunderstood, might seem to fit your description. Its actual meaning is pretty much the reverse. I won’t go into details right now because I don’t know whether you saw that slide and misunderstood it; I don’t know whether this is the TED talk you’re referring to at all. But I guess this is it.)
Incidentally: Katie Bouman was a PhD student, was not an astronomer, and was certainly not the leader of the EHT project. The project was already happening and already funded, but I suppose you could call her talk “selling the project to the public” in the sense in which any attempt to describe anything neat one’s doing is “selling the project”. Bah.
There is a TED talk by (actually, an interview with, as part of TED2019) Sheperd Doeleman, head of the EHT collaboration, whose transcript you can read on the TED website. It doesn’t say anything even slightly like that. Is there some other TED talk by her that you’re referring to? (I can’t find any evidence that there is another.)
The only other thing I can find that you conceivably might be referring to is a TEDx talk by Katie Bouman, from 2017 (before the EHT picture was produced). Her title is “How to take a picture of a black hole” and it includes a prediction of roughly what the picture might be expected to look like, and includes the words “my role in helping to take the first image of a black hole is to design algorithms that find the most reasonable image that also fits the telescope measurements”. Maybe that’s what you mean?
She doesn’t say “exactly”, or even approximately, that applying the same pipeline to random input would generate a similar result. Quite the reverse; let me quote her again. “What would happen if Einstein’s theories didn’t hold? We’d still want to reconstruct an accurate picture of what was going on. If we bake Einstein’s equations too much into our algorithms, we’ll just end up seeing what we expect to see. In other words, we want to leave the option open for there being a giant elephant at the centre of our galaxy.” She says, in other words, that a key consideration in their work was not doing exactly what you say she said they did.
(Shortly after that bit there is a slide that, if wilfully misunderstood, might seem to fit your description. Its actual meaning is pretty much the reverse. I won’t go into details right now because I don’t know whether you saw that slide and misunderstood it; I don’t know whether this is the TED talk you’re referring to at all. But I guess this is it.)
Incidentally: Katie Bouman was a PhD student, was not an astronomer, and was certainly not the leader of the EHT project. The project was already happening and already funded, but I suppose you could call her talk “selling the project to the public” in the sense in which any attempt to describe anything neat one’s doing is “selling the project”. Bah.