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It’s one of the great openings in all of American literature: “I celebrate myself, / And what I assume you shall assume, / For every atom belonging to me as […]

General relativity sure does make some counterintuitive predictions. “They say the universe is expanding. That should help with the traffic.”–Steven Wright Each week on Ask Ethan, I take a dive […]

If you’ve ever seen a beautiful picture of the Universe, thank this pioneer you’ve probably never heard of. “What you do is, you have your drawing board and a pencil in […]

The brightest “planetary nebula” is actually a Sun-like star in its final death throes! “When he shall die,Take him and cut him out in little stars,And he will make the face […]

Plus a bonus: perhaps the single most important achievement to all of humanity. “What was most significant about the lunar voyage was not that men set foot on the Moon, […]

Now that the Higgs has been discovered, the Standard Model is complete. But are there any other new particles? “The particle and the planet are subject to the same laws […]

Let me remind you of why I think all the Singularity talk about making what used to be called personal immortality possible by turning each of us into conscious machines is ridiculous. […]

The speed of light in a vacuum is the limit for massless particles, but massive ones are limited even further! “All our sweetest hours fly the fastest.” -Virgil If you’ve been […]

Where the first atoms in the Universe — the progenitors of all the normal matter that makes up everything we know — came from. “I see a lot of new faces. But, you know the […]

To take an idea and put it into Earth’s orbit requires the dedication of an incredible amount of time, energy, and resources to not only the payload itself, but also […]

“How do you do that?” young Charlie Parker would ask older musicians. “Would you please do that again?” Those who know jazz, or who only know of jazz greats such […]

The Microbial Academy of Sciences is an academy where microbes would be in a position to study the cosmos. 

One of the only members of the Virgo Cluster… that isn’t located in Virgo! “[L]ife is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the […]

The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or in politics, but it is not the path to knowledge, and there's no place for it in the endeavor of science.

When we look across the Universe, we find that things used to be closer together in the past. So how large do things appear when they’re very far away? “Life is […]

Of all the galaxies in our local supercluster, one outweighs them all. “I recognize my limits, but when I look around I realise I am not living, exactly, in a world […]

It seems to me that our communication will begin in terms of mathematics and physics.

Astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson is giving the late Carl Sagan a fitting tribute by hosting a new 13-part docu-series called "Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey" on FOX. 

If the Universe began with equal amount of matter and antimatter, why does matter dominate today’s cosmos? “You may not feel outstandingly robust, but if you are an average-sized adult you […]

Answer: Hormones. That’s true, but not the whole predicament. Middle school has issues. The problem is often folded into a larger, if illusory, “problem” of the U.S. public school system […]

The ethics of "first contact" was the subject of a panel discussion at last week's Starship Congress, where attendees hashed out the logistics and consequences of becoming an interstellar civilization.

“Rapid urbanization is the fastest, most intense social phenomenon that ever happened to humankind, perhaps to biology on Earth. I think we can now start to understand in new and […]

So I thought I’d share with you  my contribution to a symposium sponsored by a fairly conservative organization on what to do to improve the teaching of the humanities.  The other contributions […]

Have you ever noticed how long people look at a painting in a museum or gallery? Surveys have clocked view times anywhere between 10 and 17 seconds. The Louvre estimated […]

Drifting in the deep, the hulking, yet streamlined mammoth unleashes a string of sound, a booming, but delicate song. 

I assert that if you were depressed after learning and being exposed to the cosmic perspective, you started your day with an unjustifiably large ego.

If we scaled the entire Universe’s history from the Big Bang until now to be “one Universe year,” what would our future look like? “The way to love anything is to […]

As soon as we abandon the first intuitions we have, that we’re the ones in control of everything, then we can start sailing into the inner cosmos and discovering all sorts of new planets and life forms and things like that on the inside of our skulls. 

Here are some of the my reflections, based on more than three decades of teaching, on how to think about the place of liberal education in America.  That place, for […]

Oprah Winfrey, the internationally famous talk-show host, media proprietor, philanthropist, recently declared that disbelief in god is incompatible with experiencing wonder. However, Winfrey’s unjustified view on atheism is only the […]