To read this post please scroll down.

 

THANK YOU!!

 

My November fund-raising campaign for Behind the Black is now over. As I noted below, up until this month 2025 had been a poor year for donations. This campaign changed that, drastically. November 2025 turned out to be the most successful fund-raising campaign in the fifteen-plus years I have been running this webpage. And it more than doubled the previous best campaign!

 

Words escape me! I thank everyone who donated or subscribed. Your support convinces me I should go on with this work, even if it sometimes seems to me that no one in power ever reads what I write, or even considers my analysis worth considering. Maybe someday this will change.

 

Either way, I will continue because I know I have readers who really want to read what I have to say. Thank you again!

 

This announcement will remain at the top of each post for the next few days, to make sure everyone who donated will see it.

 

The original fund-raising announcement:

  ----------------------------------

It is unfortunately time for another November fund-raising campaign to support my work here at Behind the Black. I really dislike doing these, but 2025 is so far turning out to be a very poor year for donations and subscriptions, the worst since 2020. I very much need your support for this webpage to survive.

 

And I think I provide real value. Fifteen years ago I said SLS was garbage and should be cancelled. Almost a decade ago I said Orion was a lie and a bad idea. As early as 1998, long before almost anyone else, I predicted in my first book, Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8, that private enterprise and freedom would conquer the solar system, not government. Very early in the COVID panic and continuing throughout I noted that every policy put forth by the government (masks, social distancing, lockdowns, jab mandates) was wrong, misguided, and did more harm than good. In planetary science, while everyone else in the media still thinks Mars has no water, I have been reporting the real results from the orbiters now for more than five years, that Mars is in fact a planet largely covered with ice.

 

I could continue with numerous other examples. If you want to know what others will discover a decade hence, read what I write here at Behind the Black. And if you read my most recent book, Conscious Choice, you will find out what is going to happen in space in the next century.

 

This last claim might sound like hubris on my part, but I base it on my overall track record.

 

So please consider donating or subscribing to Behind the Black, either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. I could really use the support at this time. There are five ways of doing so:

 

1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.

 

2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation. Takes about a 10% cut.
 

3. A Paypal Donation or subscription, which takes about a 15% cut:

 

4. Donate by check. I get whatever you donate. Make the check payable to Robert Zimmerman and mail it to
 
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652

 

You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.


Conflict in Hubble constant increases with new data from Hubble and Gaia

The uncertainty of science: New data from the Hubble Space Telescope and Gaia continues to measure a different Hubble constant for the expansion rate of the universe, when compared with data from the Planck space telescope.

Using Hubble and newly released data from Gaia, Riess’ team measured the present rate of expansion to be 73.5 kilometers (45.6 miles) per second per megaparsec. This means that for every 3.3 million light-years farther away a galaxy is from us, it appears to be moving 73.5 kilometers per second faster. However, the Planck results predict the universe should be expanding today at only 67.0 kilometers (41.6 miles) per second per megaparsec. As the teams’ measurements have become more and more precise, the chasm between them has continued to widen, and is now about 4 times the size of their combined uncertainty.

The problem really is very simple: We haven’t the faintest idea what is going on. We have some data, but we also have enormous gaps in our knowledge of the cosmos. Moreover, most of our cosmological data is reliant on too many assumptions that could be wrong, or simply in error. And the errors can be tiny and still throw the results off by large amounts.

The one thing that good science and skepticism teaches is humbleness. Do not be too sure of your conclusions. The universe is a large and complex place. It likes to throw curve balls at us, and if we swing too soon we will certainly miss.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 

The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

9 comments

  • Lou

    Amazing how the more you learn, the more you realize that you don’t know much!

  • Localfluff

    There is certainly a lot more than a faint idea about the expansion of the universe! Don’t play so uneducated. They are zooming in on the decimals. What would you have guessed yourself? Probably that the Sun orbits the Earth…

    Please, show some respect!

  • Edward

    Localfluff,
    Do not confuse precision (more decimals) for accuracy (correctness). My clock may be able to precisely tell time to within a thousandth of a second (3 decimals), but if it is a minute off, it is not so accurate.

    The article notes that there are different values that differ wildly by more than the uncertainty of either or both calculations. Which one is the more accurate? No one knows whether either is accurate.

    Planck is trying to understand the expansion by predicting today’s rate from the universe as we see that it had been 13.79964 billion years ago (plus or minus 50 million years or so). Since their prediction — based upon what we “know” to be right and true — disagrees with observation — also right and true — something is wrong about our “knowledge” of the universe.

    However, the more we try to answer this question, the more we learn how to answer it.

  • wayne

    Before the Big Bang episode 7
    “An Eternal Cyclic Universe, CCC revisited & Twistor Theory”
    https://youtu.be/FVDJJVoTx7s
    55:25

  • Garry

    The link shows a graph I found years ago elsewhere (not at the link). I keep it handy on my desktop, and open it from time to time to remind myself how little I really know.

    https://blog.gardeviance.org/2008/04/three-stages-of-expertise.html

  • Garry: Most excellent. I think it used to be that our culture emphasized what this graph expresses. Now I am not so sure.

  • wayne

    Edward…..
    Speaking of Max Planck:
    “Science advances, one funeral at a time.”

  • eddie willers

    Paraphrasing Mark Twain:

    When I was 17, my father was the stupidest man on Earth. Now that I am 21, it’s amazing what the old man has learned in just 4 years.

  • Localfluff

    Edwin Hubble’s discovery of intergalactic space and that it expands was the greatest discovery in observational astronomy of the 20th century. The expansion came pretty much out of the blue and revised Einsteins relativity theory (“my biggest blunder”). Edwin himself never seems to have taken an outspoken stand on the Big Bang theory, although that’s the obvious conclusion if one traces backwards. Maybe because he was not primarily a theoretical astronomer. Maybe because he thought that the universe is weirder than we can understand. (And he didn’t get the Nobel prize with the motivation that astronomy is not physics…)

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