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.
In the quantum world of the unstable, even identical particles don’t have identical masses. In the microscopic world of the quantum particle, there are certain rules that are wholly unfamiliar […]
After a 16 year wait, the star SO-2 will speed past our galaxy’s supermassive black hole at 2.5% the speed of light. It will be the first-of-its-kind test of Einstein’s […]
If the multiverse is real, why hasn’t our Universe, in a sea of infinite possibilities, run into another one at least once? The Universe we inhabit is vast, full of matter […]
Distances in the expanding Universe don’t work like you’d expect. Unless, that is, you learn to think like a cosmologist. There are a few fundamental facts about the Universe — its origin, […]
LISA, the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, will not only be the space-based successor to LIGO, but will predict black hole mergers up to years in advance. Across the Universe, innumerable masses […]
They say there’s a singularity, but must that be true? When you fall inside the event horizon of a black hole, there’s no escaping, no matter what you do or how […]
Images taken 20 years apart show the rate of evaporation, and they’ll take much more than mere thousands of years to destroy. In 1995, the Hubble Space Telescope snapped one of […]
There are no punches to pull here. If America believes in science, research, or basic truths about the Universe, we cannot cancel this mission. Last week, the White House released their […]
A single, complete view of half the world was enough to teach us how these distant, frozen bodies work. On July 14, 2015, NASA’s New Horizons flew by Pluto. Pluto’s atmosphere, […]
The medal-winning Norwegian team had a most unusual explanation for why their speed skaters wore blue. Is there any science to back it up? Every four years, the Olympics come around, […]
Okay, this is an incredible and rare opportunity, but I’m so pleased to announce that next January, from the 18th-24th, 2019, I’ll be leading an exclusive AstroTour of Iceland! We’ll […]
Asteroid strikes and supervolcano eruptions may yet have patterns to them, but the extinctions we’ve experienced appear to have occurred at random. Throughout the history of life on Earth, there have […]
There are many arguments over what makes a theory beautiful, elegant, or compelling. But in the face of data, predictive power is everything. When you look at any phenomenon in […]
Unless you can make a force that travels faster than the speed of light, a singularity is inevitable. The more mass you place into a small volume of space, the […]
There’s no way to frame this as anything other than a disaster for humanity. This article was originally written one week ago, on the day the FY2019 budget was released […]
The season finale gets the one thing Star Trek is famous for — ethics — completely wrong. Life is full of dilemmas whose solutions seem paradoxical. To obtain peace, you must prepare for war. […]
The Universe may defy our intuition, but that’s what science is for! If you take a look out at the Universe, and in every direction you look, you see objects rushing […]
The science of volcanic lighting is almost as spectacular as the phenomenon itself. When hot, molten rock pushes its way up through the Earth’s crust and exits through to the […]
If you want to go where no one has gone before, you have to make the investment. Here’s what last week’s launch means. If you want to send humans to Mars, […]
Quantum interpretations are all the rage. Too bad you don’t even need one. In everyday life, there are certain rules we take for granted: cause-and-effect, for instance. Something occurs, and that […]
The hole in the ozone is shrinking, for sure, but to assess the whole layer, you need to look at the whole Earth. Throughout the history of life on Earth, there’s […]
The next-to-last episode of the first season is heavy on plot and character development, but packs a science and ethical punch, too. What do you do when, after a life-threatening journey […]
Did you hear the story about how a 100 petawatt laser will finally ‘break the quantum vacuum’? Get the facts. Empty space, as it turns out, isn’t so empty. The fluctuations […]
It isn’t just for merging neutron stars, anymore. Over the past three years, there’s arguably been no greater scientific discovery than the direct detection of gravitational waves. The two LIGO […]
But is this really a problem for the theory? Or is it physics to the rescue? Dark matter is one of the most powerful, yet one of the most controversial, ideas […]
If you want to know how we get something from nothing, you’d better understand what we mean! When we look around at our world and Universe today, we talk and think […]
Elegance, beauty, and mathematical precision makes for a compelling story and an exquisite model. But it doesn’t make it right. Scientific theories, at their best, are simple, straightforward, full of predictive […]
Plus, how the mycelium network’s destruction could, physically, actually end life in the Universe. Imagine taking a seemingly impossible journey: traveling to another Universe on a network of biological spores […]
There are lots of properties inherent to particles, and while everyone has an antiparticle, not everyone is matter or antimatter. For every particle of matter that’s known to exist in […]
If everything goes right, astronomy will take a magnificent leap into the future. But here’s what needs to happen first. Back in 2000, NASA held their decadal survey, choosing what would […]