India signs deal for its own LIGO

To read this post please scroll down.

Readers! A November fund-raising drive!

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.

March 31, 2016 11:56 am Robert Zimmerman

India today signed an agreement with the National Science Foundation to build its own LIGO gravitational wave detector

This deal, combined with the possibility that TMT might move to India as well, suggests that India is about to move aggressively from the Third World to the First. And the reason, after decades of wallowing in poverty and failure, is that they finally abandoned in the late 1990s the Soviet models of socialism and communism and embraced private enterprise and capitalism, ideas championed by the United States.

If only some modern Americans would do the same.

One comment

Tom Billings
March 31, 2016 at 6:55 pm
“And the reason, after decades of wallowing in poverty and failure, is that they finally abandoned in the late 1990s the Soviet models of socialism and communism and embraced private enterprise and capitalism, ideas championed by the United States.”

Actually, the fight with the Babu State continues. It has existed inside India since at least the Empire of Asoka, adapting to one conqueror after another, and the local Babu still expects to be treated with the deference due a representative of an Emperor. Fortunately for these science projects, the Babus are among those hungry to demonstrate what their State can do to boost India’s standing in the world.

IMHO, they are still in a steep part of their climb out of agrarian culture, and will be as long as their Babu State has the ear of the politicians. Yes, our progressive movement has put us in that position as well through their efforts over the last 130 years. After all, the great patron of academia from whence progressivism sprung is the State, which is staffed by the same academic clerk sorts that make up the Babu State.

The Babu State will gladly adopt the physical epiphenomena of industrial technology. Still, Indian culture is a long way from telling them to take a hike, allowing freedoms of participation in the worldwide networks of industrial society, and the Babus intend to keep it that way.

India signs deal for its own LIGO

One comment

Leave a Reply