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.
It’s 13.8 billion years old, with an uncertainty of just 1%. Here’s how. How old is the Universe? For generations, people argued over whether the Universe had always existed, whether it […]
For the first time in many years, there’s currently a comet visible to the naked eye in Earth’s night sky: comet NEOWISE. For the first time in many years, there’s currently […]
Without quantum physics, the Sun wouldn’t shine at all. Earth, as we know it, is only teeming with life because of the influence of our Sun. Its light and heat provides […]
According to the Standard Model, the leptons and antileptons should all be separate, independent particles from one another. But the three types of neutrino all mix together, indicating they must […]
For northern hemisphere skywatchers, it might just be the century’s best comet so far. Every once in a while, large, icy objects pass through the inner Solar System. C/2014 Q2 (Lovejoy) […]
5 years ago, LIGO detected our first gravitational waves here on Earth. Next decade, LISA will start seeing them from space. When it comes to gravitational waves, our terrestrial laser interferometers […]
At a very simple level, it’s nothing but physics. Here’s why you should care. It’s not very often that a physics problem becomes a politicized issue, but that’s exactly what’s happened […]
The biggest error from ‘A Brief History of Time’ continues to misinform generations of aspiring physicists. The greatest idea of Stephen Hawking’s scientific career truly revolutionized how we think about […]
We still don’t know how it came to be this way. Every once in a while, we find an object in the Universe that completely mystifies us. For generations, astronomers have […]
Almost certainly not. Here’s the science of why. The Universe, as we know it, simply doesn’t add up. On the one hand, we can look out on a cosmic scale and […]
Here’s how the closest place to “hell” in our Solar System might actually be home to life. From afar, Venus seems like the most uninhabitable planet of all. NASA’s Magellan mission […]
The Standard Model and General Relativity can’t be all there is. But how will we discover what lies beyond them? One of the biggest problems with physics is that, apart from […]
July 4th and New Years Eve are the most dangerous times for a hail of falling bullets from ‘celebratory gunfire.’ “What goes up, must come down,” is an old saying […]
The theoretical reasons to expect it are compelling, but the technology required to detect it is unfathomable. All throughout our galaxy, millions of black holes of a variety of masses […]
There’s a lot left to understand, ponder, and investigate. And there always will be. For hundreds of thousands of years — nearly all of human history — we had no definitive answers to some of […]
From the right place at the right time, it’s a sight unlike any you’ll find on Earth. In our Solar System, any planet with moons has a chance for a solar […]
It’s perhaps the most famous thought experiment in all of physics, but is full of popular myths and misconceptions. One of the most bizarre ideas about the quantum Universe is […]
Light cannot escape from a black hole, no matter what. But when two black holes merge? They just might. On September 14, 2015, history was made as the NSF’s twin LIGO […]
It contains more water than all the Great Lakes combined, and the science of our planet explains why. Although practically all of Earth’s human population lives on dry land, our surface […]
CERN’s bold new proposal has physicists confronting the biggest question of all: is building a new collider worth it? If you want to discover anything novel about the natural, physical […]
Without a little help from Einstein, we couldn’t have made this discovery. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, currently celebrating its 30th anniversary, still churns out novel discoveries. The Hubble eXtreme Deep […]
This mystery comes in two varieties: repeating and non-repeating. Here’s what we know so far. Imagine that you were looking out at the distant Universe, watching the stars, galaxies, and the […]
This year’s June solstice coincides with a new Moon and an annular solar eclipse. Here’s how rare it truly is. As the Earth orbits the Sun, it rotates on its axis. […]
You never know what you’re going to find when you look somewhere new for the first time. Approximately 4600 feet (1400 meters) underground, beneath the Italian mountain known as Gran Sasso, […]
One look at the uncertainties and the assumptions changes the story tremendously. Is there intelligent life out there in the Milky Way beyond our own Solar System? If so, how […]
The view from beyond Pluto is far enough from Earth that we can see the stars shift. NASA’s New Horizons, humanity’s first spacecraft to encounter Pluto, is more than 4.3 billion […]
Nothing in the Universe can travel faster than the speed of light. So how does space itself do it? One of the fundamental rules we all learn in physics — set forth by […]
Even physicists sometimes fall for these. For centuries, the laws of physics seemed completely deterministic. If you knew where every particle was, how fast it was moving, and what the forces […]
Too little breathing room, tear gas, and insufficient masks are a recipe for disaster. Police are worsening all three. Across the nation and the world, people of all skin colors are […]
Solid, liquid, and gas are the three everyone learns. Plasma is the fourth. But there are two more, and they’re fascinating. How many states of matter are there? When you […]