esiegel

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Ethan Siegel

Ethan was born in New York City as the son of a Jewish postal worker. He did his undergrad at Northwestern, taught public school in Houston, Texas and Los Angeles, California, before moving to Florida, where he got his PhD in theoretical astrophysics at the University of Florida. After that, he moved to Madison, Wisconsin, where he taught at the University of Wisconsin, ate too much cheese, and also met his life partner, Jamie. After working in astrophysics research at the University of Arizona and starting the world-renowned science blog, Starts With A Bang, he moved from the hellish desert to rain-soaked Portland in 2008. Since then, he's been a professor at the University of Portland and Lewis & Clark College, grown a nationally renowned beard and mustache, got invited to join a circus and probably drank more beer than a healthy person should. He currently works as the head curator at Trapit, and can't wait to tell you a little bit more about the Universe.

Posts by this author

Ask Ethan #82: Why are the planets all in the same plane? (Synopsis)
“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” -Vaclav Havel When you take a look at the planets in our Solar System, one of the most striking features about them is that they all orbit in almost exactly…
Throwback Thursday: The Most Astounding Fact About The Universe (Synopsis)
“Is no one inspired by our present picture of the Universe? This value of science remains unsung by singers, you are reduced to hearing not a song or poem, but an evening lecture about it. This is not yet a scientific age.” -Richard Feynman There are many scientific facts that are simply…
Could Black Holes Destroy the Universe? (Synopsis)
Out there in the Universe, black holes are some of the most extreme examples of physics in the Universe. Space is curved tremendously, there's an incredible concentration of energy all in one, singular point, and everything that occurs, in theory, outside of the event horizon can be seen in our…
Battle of the Nobel Laureates (Synopsis)
When it comes to the very nature of quantum mechanics -- about the inherent uncertainty and indeterminism to reality -- it's one of the most difficult things to accept. Perhaps, you imagine, there's some underlying cause, some hidden reality beneath what's visible that actually is…
The Most Wanted Particle (Synopsis)
“Innovation is taking two things that already exist and putting them together in a new way.” -Tom Freston Yes, the Universe can be considered the ultimate innovator, taking the fundamental particles and forces of the Universe, and assembling them into the entirety of what we know, interact with and…
How special is our Solar System? (Synopsis)
It's the simple formula we all know and recognize: inner, rocky worlds closest to the Sun, an asteroid belt farther out, and then gas giant worlds out beyond them. That's how our Solar System works, at any rate. But what about the other star systems in the Universe? Confirmed planets as of…
Astroquizzical: Do all planets rotate in orbit around their stars? (Synopsis)
When you think about our world and our place in the Solar System, you very likely think about Earth, spinning on its axis, with the Moon orbiting around it, and with the entire Earth-Moon system orbiting the Sun. But did you know that all of it -- the Earth spinning on its axis, the Moon…
Mostly Mute Monday: Volcanic Lightning (Synopsis)
“If you are caught on a golf course during a storm and are afraid of lightning, hold up a 1-iron. Not even God can hit a 1-iron.” -Lee Trevino When it comes to lightning, you inevitably think of thunderstorms, rain, and the exchange of huge amounts of charge between the clouds above and the Earth.…
Weekend Diversion: Why Cons Matter (Synopsis)
“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.” -Oscar Wilde What do you like? No, I really mean it: don't think about the things that you're supposed to like, or the things you'll admit to the world that you like, but…
Comments of the Week #53: from supertides to the LHC
“If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that's a full day. That's a heck of a day. You do that seven days a week, you're going to have something special.” -Jim Valvano It's been a little too long since I rounded up the best of your comments and doled out the astrophysics knowledge to fill in the…
Ask Ethan #81: Could you crawl out of a black hole? (Synopsis)
“Nobody ever did, or ever will, escape the consequences of his choices.” -Alfred A. Montapert You might not think of falling into a black hole as a choice, but in the case of this week's Ask Ethan, someone is choosing to explore exactly that! Image credit: original unknown, retrieved…
Throwback Thursday: Past the Fingers of God (Synopsis)
“On a cosmic scale, our life is insignificant, yet this brief period when we appear in the world is the time in which all meaningful questions arise.” -Paul Ricoeur What you see is what you get, except when it isn't. We're all familiar with Hubble's law, or the notion that the Universe is expanding…
Supertides are real!
“But less intelligible still was the flood that was caused by forty days’ rain, and forty nights’. For here on the moors there were some years when it rained for two hundred days and two hundred nights, almost without fairing; but there was never any Flood.” -Halldór Laxness Once every 18 years, a…
Could the LHC make an Earth-killing black hole? (Synopsis)
“There is, I believe, in every disposition a tendency to some particular evil, a natural defect, which not even the best education can overcome.” “And your defect is a propensity to hate everybody.” “And yours… is wilfully to misunderstand them.” -Jane Austen Every time we go to higher and higher…
Mostly Mute Monday: Marvelous Mars (Synopsis)
“Studying whether there’s life on Mars or studying how the universe began, there’s something magical about pushing back the frontiers of knowledge. That’s something that is almost part of being human, and I’m certain that will continue.” -Sally Ride When Curiosity landed on the martian surface in…
Ask Ethan #80: Can space expand faster than the speed of light? (Synopsis)
“If everything seems under control, you’re not going fast enough.” -Mario Andretti One of the toughest things to wrap your mind around in the natural world is the idea of special relativity: the faster you move, the closer you get to the speed of light, the more difficult it becomes to increase…
Throwback Thursday: What is the Sun made of? (Synopsis)
“The sun is a miasma Of incandescent plasma The sun’s not simply made out of gas No, no, no The sun is a quagmire It’s not made of fire Forget what you’ve been told in the past” -They Might Be Giants It's such a simple fact -- that the Sun is made out of hydrogen that fuses into helium, releasing…
Are the first stars in the Universe invisible? (Synopsis)
“Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.” -Marcus Aurelius Let there be light! You'd think that would be enough: that you form stars in the Universe, you see those stars in the Universe, and that tells you about what's out there. If only it were that simple…
The Universe celebrates St. Patrick’s Day (Synopsis)
“‘You are a different kind of Irishman, Goll,’ was all she said. ‘Every Irishman is a different kind of Irishman,’ said Goll.” -Charles Brady Sure, we're all a little bit Irish today. We celebrate in a plethora of different ways, the most common of which is to prominently display the…
Life in a Freely Falling Elevator (Synopsis)
Imagine that you've got that absolutely weightless feeling, the kind you get when you lose your balance and hurtle towards the ground. Are you on a roller coaster? Did you fall out of an airplane? Or are you in an accelerating elevator? Image credit: Dutch Experiment Support Center, via http://www…
Mostly Mute Monday: A final view from the Moon (Synopsis)
“Curiosity is the essence of human existence. ‘Who are we? Where are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going?’… I don’t know. I don’t have any answers to those questions. I don’t know what’s over there around the corner. But I want to find out.” -Eugene Cernan, last human on the Moon It's…
Weekend Diversion: The Ultimate Science in your Science Fiction (Synopsis)
“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.” -Isaac Asimov Yet it's that intersection -- of science with our day-to-day lives, our imaginations, our hopes, fears and dreams -- that's going to be the thing that drives us towards a…
Comments of the Week #52: from Einstein to the invisible
“That there were other worlds, invisible, unknown, beyond imagination even, was a revelation to him.” -Kim Edwards And every time two particles interact with one another, the Universe is forever different from how it was a moment before. Here at Starts With A Bang, this past week saw us…
Ask Ethan #79: The tiniest Neutron Star (Synopsis)
“Try to imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up… now try to imagine what it was like to wake up having never gone to sleep.” -Alan Watts Neutron star matter is the stuff of legends: it's the densest three-dimensional material to exist in our Universe. With a density some 10^22…
Throwback Thursday: The closest invisible lights (Synopsis)
“As a boy I believed I could make myself invisible. I’m not sure that I ever could, but I certainly had the ability to pass unnoticed.” -Terence Stamp When you take a look at the stars visible in the night sky, you're only seeing a tiny fraction of what's actually present in our galaxy. Your…
The Sun’s Littlest Secret (Synopsis)
“Every time we get slapped down, we can say, ‘Thank you, Mother Nature,’ because it means we’re about to learn something important.” -John Bahcall And what's possibly more important than learning how the Sun works? For nearly all of human history -- well into the 20th century -- we really didn't…
Photonic Booms (Synopsis)
Imagine the surface of the Moon, so distant, and an infinitely precise and powerful laser pointer. With a flick of your wrist, you can send the dot that you see flying across the Moon's surface as quickly as you can manage. Image credit: Sabine Hossenfelder. Without too much difficulty, in fact…
Mostly Mute Monday: A beautiful bridge between a lovely lens (Synopsis)
“Look and think before opening the shutter. The heart and mind are the true lens of the camera.” -Yousuf Karsh When you find an incredibly huge, dense collection of mass, all together in one place, it generally indicates a galaxy cluster of tremendous size. Image credit: NASA, ESA, G. Tremblay (…
Weekend Diversion: The astronomer who brought us the Universe (Synopsis)
“Her will tells nearly all. She left an estate worth $314.91, mostly in Liberty Bonds, with a few items such as a desk valued at $5. She never married and had few living relatives. She also left behind a legacy of a great astronomical discovery.” -Jeremy Bernstein, on Henrietta Leavitt Today is…
Comments of the Week #51: From the vacuum of space to the hierarchy problem
“Many have argued that a vacuum does not exist, others claim it exists only with difficulty in spite of the repugnance of nature; I know of no one who claims it easily exists without any resistance from nature." -Evangelista Torricelli The Universe is here, within us, out there in the great abyss…