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Adam Riess and the Hubble tension

Cosmologists are fighting over everything.

Earlier this year, Riess, who is now in his early 50s, pulled a graph-paper notebook off a bookshelf in his office at Johns Hopkins University so that I could see the yellowing page on which he’d made his famous calculations. He could see the appeal, but he hated fundraising, and unlike other, older Nobel laureates, he said, Riess still felt that he had scientific contributions to make, not as an administrator, but as a frontline investigator of capital- n Nature. When I visited Riess, back in January, he mentioned he was looking forward to a data release from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, a new observatory on Kitt Peak, in Arizona’s portion of the Sonoran Desert.

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