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.
For years and over three separate experiments, “lepton universality” appeared to violate the Standard Model. LHCb at last proved otherwise.
You can lead an overconfident chatbot to expert knowledge, but can it actually learn and assimilate new information?
2022 was a year full of scientific discoveries and the dawn of the JWST. But Hubble’s still going after 32 years. Here’s the amazing proof!
Every proton contains three quarks: two up and one down. But charm quarks, heavier than the proton itself, have been found inside. How?
Particles are everywhere, including particles from space that stream through the human body. Here’s how they prove Einstein’s relativity.
Nuclear fusion has long been seen as the future of energy. As the NIF now passes the breakeven point, how close are we to our ultimate goal?
There will always be “wolf-criers” whose claims wither under scrutiny. But aliens are certainly out there, if science dares to find them.
Leaving Hubble in the dust, JWST has officially seen a galaxy from just 320 million years after the Big Bang: at just 2.3% its current age.
The very dust that blocks our view of the distant, luminous objects in the Universe is responsible for our entire existence.
The most common element in the Universe, vital for forming new stars, is hydrogen. But there’s a finite amount of it; what if we run out?
Photons come in every wavelength you can imagine. But one particular quantum transition makes light at precisely 21 cm, and it’s magical.
We thought the Big Bang started it all. Then we realized that something else came before, and it erased everything that existed prior.
The science fiction dream of a traversable wormhole is no closer to reality, despite a quantum computer’s suggestive simulation.
It’s not only the gravity from galaxies in a cluster that reveal dark matter, but the ejected, intracluster stars actually trace it out.
A Carrington-magnitude event would kill millions, and cause trillions of dollars in damage. Sadly, it isn’t even the worst-case scenario.
Compared to Earth, Mars is small, cold, dry, and lifeless. But 3.4 billion years ago, a killer asteroid caused a Martian megatsunami.
We’ll never be able to extract any information about what’s inside a black hole’s event horizon. Here’s why a singularity is inevitable.
The great hope is that beyond the indirect, astrophysical evidence we have today, we’ll someday detect it directly. But what if we can’t?
By studying the dwarf galaxy Wolf-Lundmark-Melotte ~3 million light-years away, JWST reveals the Universe’s star-forming history firsthand.
We confidently state that the Universe is known to be 13.8 billion years old, with an uncertainty of just 1%. Here’s how we know.
Every time our Universe cools below a critical threshold, we fall out of equilibrium. That’s the best thing that ever happened to us.
The strongest tests of curved space are only possible around the lowest-mass black holes of all. Their small event horizons are the key.
Realizing that matter and energy are quantized is important, but quantum particles aren’t the full story; quantum fields are needed, too.
Our galactic home in the cosmos — the Milky Way — is only one of many trillions of galaxies within in the observable Universe. Do we have a twin?
The Universe is 13.8 billion years old, going back to the hot Big Bang. But was that truly the beginning, and is that truly its age?
SpinLaunch will cleverly attempt to reach space with minimal rocket fuel. But will physics prevent a full-scale version from succeeding?
The image you’re seeing isn’t a hole in the Universe, and the cosmic voids that do exist aren’t hole-like at all.
We think of physical reality as what objectively exists, independent of any observer. But relativity and quantum physics say otherwise.
It’s rare that one single image packs so much beauty and science simultaneously. This Hubble view of a nearby star-forming region has both.
Supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies gobble up whatever matter ventures too close, becoming active. Here’s how they work.