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Our mission is to answer the biggest questions of all, scientifically.
What is the Universe made of? How did it become the way it is today? Where did everything come from? What is the ultimate fate of the cosmos?
For most of human history, these questions had no clear answers. Today, they do. Starts With a Bang, written by Dr. Ethan Siegel, explores what we know about the universe and how we came to know it, bringing the latest discoveries in cosmology and astrophysics directly to you.
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Ethan Siegel is an award-winning PhD astrophysicist and the author of four books, including The Grand Cosmic Story, published by National Geographic.
Ask Ethan: What’s the biggest misconception in astronomy?
Many facts are well-known to professionals, but are unappreciated or even rejected outright by the public. "How stars work" takes the cake.
No matter how good our measurement devices get, certain quantum properties always possess an inherent uncertainty. Can we figure out why?
At a fundamental level, only a few particles and forces govern all of reality. How do their combinations create human consciousness?
In all the Universe, only a few particles are eternally stable. The photon, the quantum of light, has an infinite lifetime. Or does it?
Our Universe requires dark matter in order to make sense of things, astrophysically. Could massive photons do the trick?
For some reason, when we talk about the age of stars, galaxies, and the Universe, we use "years" to measure time. Can we do better?
Is the Universe finite or infinite? Does it go on forever or loop back on itself? Here's what would happen if you traveled forever.
Life arose on Earth very early on. After a few billion years, here we are: intelligent and technologically advanced. Where's everyone else?
There are over 100 known elements in the periodic table. These 8 ways of making them account for every one.
Many contrarians dispute that cosmic inflation occurred. The evidence says otherwise.
And either way, is energy or information conserved? When two things in the Universe that “always” occur meet one another, how do you know which one will win? Gravitational waves, […]
Scalars, vectors, and tensors come up all the time in science. But what are they? One of the major goals of science is to describe our reality as accurately as possible. […]
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 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 […]
We’ve argued over ideology for far too long. It’s time to pick a better route to prosperity. In every civilized society around the world, there’s a trade-off that must be […]
Forget the speed of light or the electron’s charge. This is the physical constant that really matters. Why is our Universe the way it is, and not some other way? There […]
The history of life on Earth took many meandering turns before it gave rise to us. When Earth first formed, all the raw ingredients for life — atoms, molecules, a potentially habitable planet […]
We’re a long way from the beginnings of life on Earth. Here’s the key to how we got there. The Universe was already two-thirds of its present age by the time […]
A climate catastrophe 2 billion years ago almost ended life on Earth. Here’s the biggest lesson of all. Although it was more than 4½ billion years ago that planet Earth formed, […]
One moment, every particle in the Universe was massless. Then, they weren’t anymore. Here’s how it happened. In the earliest stages of the hot Big Bang, the Universe was filled […]
Saw “Solar System Questions” by xkcd? Here’s what science thinks it knows. “Put two ships in the open sea, without wind or tide, and, at last, they will come together. […]