NPR (Sept. 21) -- A lot of science's history is just one story after another of people figuring out how to do something that, just a few years before, was thought to be impossible, such as taking pictures of black holes. The impossible was heavy on my mind last Wednesday as I found out just how close we were to seeing — as in taking actual pictures — of black holes. Charles Gammie, a computational astrophysicist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, uses supercomputers to simulate the behavior of fluids in space (i.e gases or plasmas).