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Ethan Siegel
Theoretical astrophysicist and science writer
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.
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‘Reductio ad absurdum’ won’t help you in an absurd Universe. Throughout history, there have been two main ways humanity has attempted to gain knowledge about the world: top-down, where we […]
Using atoms to probe the Universe reveals the complete Standard Model. If you wanted to uncover the secrets of the Universe for yourself, all you’d have to do is interrogate […]
By the end of the decade, we may discover one million black holes. A large enough mass in a compact volume inevitably forms a black hole. Both inside and outside the […]
If everything eventually dies and decays, is there a way to prolong the inevitable? Our Universe, as it exists today, puts us in an incredibly privileged position. Had we come […]
A black woman most have never heard of made GPS possible. Over the span of a single lifetime, the world has changed in ways that would have been virtually unimaginable […]
The definitive answer requires better, unbiased data. Despite all the advances that have occurred in human history, one extraordinary puzzle still remains right in our own backyard: we aren’t sure how […]
And Dr. Jill Tarter never once lost her composure.
If you think it’s just three quarks held together by gluons, you’ll want to read this. At a fundamental level, the Universe is composed of indivisible particles. From macroscopic scales down […]
Are space and time real like atoms are, or is spacetime just a calculational tool? When most of us think about the Universe, we think about the material objects that […]
Of all the injustices in Nobel Prize history, her 1957 Nobel snub is the most egregious. One of the biggest scientific revolutions of the 20th century was the discovery of […]
Debris from Pluto-sized collisions, not aliens, are streaming through the galaxy. In 2017, scientists discovered an object passing through our Solar System that was unlike anything else we had ever seen. […]
The concept of ‘relativistic mass’ has been around almost as long as relativity has. But is it valid? No matter who you are, where you are, or how quickly you’re moving, […]
NASA’s SOFIA mission is upgraded and back in action, and the Cigar Galaxy makes a perfect target. In theory, cold, neutral gas is the key to stars and galaxies. A visualization […]
Being a small piece of a large experiment is vital to the enterprise of science. Have you ever wondered what it’s like to work as a small (but vital) part of […]
Are dark matter and dark energy both two sides of the same coin? When it comes to the Universe, what you can easily see isn’t always reflective of all there is. […]
The inevitable long, slow decline is accelerating, and there’s nothing we can do. The Universe, as it is today, is less active, is forming fewer stars, and is creating fewer chances […]
Science was never the same after meeting ‘the particle who lived.’ Back in the early 1930s, there were only a few known fundamental particles that made up the Universe. If you […]
Thou shalt not conclude “aliens” from insufficient data. When it comes to what’s out there in this Universe, perhaps the only thing that’s greater than our cosmic ignorance is the […]
Just say no to artist’s illustrations. This is what the Universe actually looks like. The Universe we observe often surpasses our greatest imaginings. This 20-year time-lapse of stars near the center […]
The Big Bang is our accepted origin of the Universe. But is there another possibility? Since the mid-1960s and the discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background, the Big Bang has […]