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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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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 […]
Surprisingly, the evidence points towards the existence of the unobservable multiverse. But it isn’t the answer you’re looking for. “We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that […]
If humans were made in God’s image, then whose image were aliens made in? A simple, innocent question that I received had me thinking for days about how to answer it. […]
The ‘big event’ was billed as a first in 150 years. But is what we’re seeing really that rare? This January 31st, something quite rare and special will happen. At 1:30 […]
It’s so much more than mass-energy equivalence; it’s the key to unlocking the quantum Universe. For hundreds of years, there was an immutable law of physics that was never challenged: […]
What it would take to make a ‘mirror Universe’ a reality. The idea of parallel Universes has been around for over 60 years now, giving a theoretically physical existence to all […]
If nothing can escape from beneath the event horizon, where do these phenomena come from? The most important feature of a black hole is that it has an event horizon: a […]
Would there be only blackness past the event horizon? Or something more? Black holes are some of the most perplexing objects in the entire Universe. Objects so dense, where gravitation […]
There’s nothing new, recent, or remarkable about it. It’s just a typical cosmic pebble in the galactic ocean. Last year, the interstellar interloper ʻOumuamua passed through the inner Solar System. Originally […]
The neutron star-neutron star merger was initially only seen in 1 detector out of 3. Here’s how scientists didn’t let it slip away. On August 17th, 2017, a gravitational wave event […]
Even if it can’t detect them directly, we’ll learn the answer. Here’s how. Perhaps the most revolutionary find of the past generation, when we think about the Universe beyond Earth, is […]