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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.
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Scalars, vectors, and tensors come up all the time in physics. They're more than mathematical structures. They help describe the Universe.
Since the mid-1960s, the CMB has been identified with the Big Bang's leftover glow. Could any alternative explanations still work?
Our classical intuition is no good in a quantum Universe. To make sense of it, we need to learn, and apply, an entirely novel set of rules.
It's the ultimate setup for a Thanksgiving Day disaster. The physics of water and its solid, liquid, and gas phases compels us not to do it.
The most massive early galaxies grew up faster, and have more stars, than astronomers expected, according to JWST. What does it all mean?
There are a few small cosmic details that, if things were just a little different, wouldn't have allowed our existence to be possible.
When we see pictures from Hubble or JWST, they show the Universe in a series of brilliant colors. But what do those colors really tell us?
The last naked-eye Milky Way supernova happened way back in 1604. With today's detectors, the next one could solve the dark matter mystery.
Since 1930, type Ia supernovae have been thought to arise from white dwarfs exceeding the Chandrasekhar mass limit. Here's why that's wrong.
In partisan political times, recognizing the scientific truth is more important than ever. Scientists must be vocal and clear about reality.
In astronomy, a star's initial mass determines its ultimate outcome in life. Unless, that is, a stellar companion alters the deal.
Black holes are the most massive individual objects, spanning up to a light-day across. So how do they make jets that affect the cosmic web?
Humans, when we consider space travel, recognize the need for gravity. Without our planet, is artificial or antigravity even possible?
All the stars, stellar corpses, planets, and other large, massive objects take on spherical or spheroidal shapes. Why is that universal?
A crowdsourced "final exam" for AI promises to test LLMs like never before. Here's how the idea, and its implementation, dooms us to fail.
The 5th brightest star in our night sky is young, blue, and apparently devoid of massive planets. New JWST observations deepen the mystery.
Whether your hair is straight, wavy, curly, or kinky isn't just genetic in nature. It depends on the physics of your hair's very atoms.
One of the 20th century's most famous, influential, and successful physicists is lauded the world over. But Feynman is no hero to me.
Due to chaos, it was long thought that planets couldn't stably orbit systems containing three stars. GW Orionis is the first counterexample.
Mars and Earth were sister planets in many ways, with early similar conditions. Why did Mars die? The leading explanation isn't universal.