Ethan Siegel
A theoretical astrophysicist and science writer, host of popular podcast "Starts with a Bang!"
Ethan Siegel is a Ph.D. astrophysicist and author of "Starts with a Bang!" He is a science communicator, who professes physics and astronomy at various colleges. He has won numerous awards for science writing since 2008 for his blog, including the award for best science blog by the Institute of Physics. His two books "Treknology: The Science of Star Trek from Tricorders to Warp Drive" and "Beyond the Galaxy: How humanity looked beyond our Milky Way and discovered the entire Universe" are available for purchase at Amazon. Follow him on Twitter @startswithabang.
If you can model anything in the Universe with an equation, mathematics is how you get the solution(s). Physics must go a step further.
From black holes to dark energy to chances for life in the Universe, our cosmic journey to understand it all is just getting started.
No. No no no. Just… no. The JWST has truly blown our scientific minds, but it’s a pure crackpot idea that the Big Bang is now disproven.
Is science absolute? Its truths and discoveries guide us toward the nature of reality, but we must always remain open-minded to revisions.
As we gain new knowledge, our scientific picture of how the Universe works must evolve. This is a feature of the Big Bang, not a bug.
Einstein’s “happiest thought” led to General Relativity’s formulation. Would a different profound insight have led us forever astray?
As we look to larger cosmic scales, we get a broader view of the expansive cosmic forest, eventually revealing the grandest views of all.
Our model of the Universe, dominated by dark matter and dark energy, explains almost everything we see. Almost. Here’s what remains.
Magnetic monopoles began as a mere theoretical curiosity. They might hold the key to understanding so much more.
The anthropic principle has fascinating scientific uses, where the simple fact of our existence holds deep physical lessons. Don’t abuse it!
The game of Plinko perfectly illustrates chaos theory. Even with indistinguishable initial conditions, the outcome is always uncertain.
At their cores, stars can reach many millions or even billions of degrees. But even that doesn’t touch the hottest of all.
There’s an extra source of massive “stuff” in our Universe beyond what gravitation and normal matter can explain. Could light be the answer?
If you have an old TV set with the “rabbit ear” antennae, and you set it to channel 03, that snowy static can reveal the Big Bang itself.
Unless you have a critical mass of heavy elements when your star first forms, planets, including rocky ones, are practically impossible.
The whole isn’t greater than the sum of its parts; that’s a flaw in our thinking. Non-reductionism requires magic, not merely science.
There’s an extremely good chance that there is, or at least was, life on Mars. But is it native to Mars, or did it originate from Earth?
In all the Universe, only a few particles are eternally stable. The photon, the quantum of light, has an infinite lifetime. Or does it?
Dark matter has never been directly detected, but the astronomical evidence for its existence is overwhelming. Here’s what to know.
With a telescope at just the right distance from the Sun, we could use its gravity to enhance and magnify a potentially inhabited planet.
We only detected our very first gravitational wave in 2015. Over the next two decades, we’ll have thousands more.
We knew we’d find galaxies unlike any seen before in its first deep-field image. But the other images hold secrets even more profound.
There are so many problems, all across planet Earth, that harm and threaten humanity. Why invest in researching the Universe?
Ever since the start of the hot Big Bang, time ticks forward as the Universe expands. But could time ever run backward, instead?
Searching for dark matter, the XENON collaboration found absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. Here’s why that’s an extraordinary feat.
Even though the leftover glow from the Big Bang creates a bath of radiation at only 2.725 K, some places in the Universe get even colder.
We live in a four-dimensional Universe, where matter and energy curve the fabric of spacetime. But time sure is different from space!
There’s a speed limit to the Universe: the speed of light in a vacuum. Want to beat the speed of light? Try going through a medium!
Even at its faintest, Venus always outshines every other star and planet that’s visible from Earth, and then some!
Take a peek at the pre-release images used to calibrate and commission JWST’s coldest instrument, now ready for full science operations.