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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

Physicists Must Accept That Some Things Are Unknowable (Synopsis)
"To know that we know what we know, and to know that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge." -Nicolaus Copernicus As we peel back the layers of information deeper and deeper into the Universe's history, we uncover progressively more knowledge about how everything we know today…
Comments of the Week #94: from nuclear bombs to the changing culture of astronomy
“Observing quasars is like observing the exhaust fumes of a car from a great distance and then trying to figure out what is going on under the hood.” -Carole Mundell Enjoying what we're putting out at Starts With A Bang? There was a whole lot that we saw this past week, including a few…
Ask Ethan: How Fast Do Gravitational Waves Travel? (Synopsis)
"Einstein's gravitational theory, which is said to be the greatest single achievement of theoretical physics, resulted in beautiful relations connecting gravitational phenomena with the geometry of space; this was an exciting idea." -Richard P. Feynman When Einstein's theory was first proposed as…
What All The Harassment Stories In Astronomy Really Mean (Synopsis)
“Beauty provokes harassment, the law says, but it looks through men's eyes when deciding what provokes it.” -Naomi Wolf Geoff Marcy. Tim Slater. Christian Ott. And a great many more who are just waiting to be publicly exposed for what they've done (and in many cases, are still doing). Does it mean…
The Universe's Dark Ages May Hold The Secrets To Dark Matter, Inflation, And Even String Theory (Synopsis)
"When their eyes grew dim with looking at unrevealing dials and studying uneventful graphs, they could step outside their concrete cells and renew their dull spirits in communion with the giant mechanism they commanded, the silent, sensing instrument in which the smallest packets of energy, the…
The Science of Powerball (Synopsis)
“I’ve done the calculation and your chances of winning the lottery are identical whether you play or not.” -Fran Lebowitz Later today, the richest lottery drawing in history -- the $1.5 billion Powerball jackpot -- will take place. While many outlets are encouraging people to purchase as many…
The Early Universe's Most Massive Galaxy Cluster Revealed (Synopsis)
"If you take a galaxy and try to make it bigger, it becomes a cluster of galaxies, not a galaxy. If you try to make it smaller than that, it seems to blow itself apart." -Jeremiah P. Ostriker 13.8 billion years ago, the Universe as we know it was born with no stars, no clusters and no galaxies. But…
Comments of the Week #93: from interstellar travel to an unknown monster
"Observing quasars is like observing the exhaust fumes of a car from a great distance and then trying to figure out what is going on under the hood." -Carole Mundell Have you been tunes in to Starts With A Bang during this past week? The first full week of January brings with it the…
Ask Ethan: How Can We Know If North Korea Is Testing Nuclear Bombs? (Synopsis)
"In this first testing ground of the atomic bomb I have seen the most terrible and frightening desolation in four years of war. It makes a blitzed Pacific island seem like an Eden. The damage is far greater than photographs can show." -Wilfred Burchett The news has been aflame with reports that…
The First All-Sky Extreme Energy Map Reveals An Unknown Monster In Our Galaxy (Synopsis)
"I happen to have discovered a direct relation between magnetism and light, also electricity and light, and the field it opens is so large and I think rich." -Michael Faraday With the launch of the Fermi satellite in the late 2000s, we began observing the highest energy photons in the Universe --…
Why cosmic inflation's last great prediction may fail (Synopsis)
“The paradigm of physics — with its interplay of data, theory and prediction — is the most powerful in science.” -Geoffrey West Cosmic inflation, our earliest theory of the Universe and the phenomenon that sets up the Big Bang, didn't just explain a number of puzzles, but made a slew of new…
Kepler Found Its Longest-Period Planet Ever (Synopsis)
"Mars is much closer to the characteristics of Earth. It has a fall, winter, summer and spring. North Pole, South Pole, mountains and lots of ice. No one is going to live on Venus; no one is going to live on Jupiter." -Buzz Aldrin When a planet passes in front of its star from our point of view,…
Why Are Pluto And Charon So Different? (Synopsis)
“Just as a Chihuahua is still a dog, these ice dwarfs are still planetary bodies. The misfit becomes the average. The Pluto-like objects are more typical in our solar system than the nearby planets we first knew.” -Alan Stern When New Horizons approached the Pluto system last year, it discovered…
The closest star system to us doesn't have any planets (yet), after all
“You're on Earth. There's no cure for that.” -Samuel Beckett In 2012, astronomers announced that the nearest star system to us, the Alpha Centauri system, possessed at least one exoplanet around it. A periodic signal that recurred just every 3.24 days was consistent with an Earth-sized exoplanet…
A Distant Galaxy Cluster Reveals The Power Of Einstein's Gravity (Synopsis)
"Gravitational and electromagnetic interactions are long-range interactions, meaning they act on objects no matter how far they are separated from each other." -Francois Englert One of the most spectacular predictions of Einstein's General Relativity was the existence of gravitational lensing,…
Comments of the Week #92: from the Universe's birth to ten decades of science
"The big secret in life is that there is no big secret. Whatever your goal, you can get there if you're willing to work." -Oprah And 2016 is here! So begins another great year for Starts With A Bang, and I'm so pleased you're still here as well. Yes, I know there are some frustrations…
Ask Ethan: Is Interstellar Travel Possible? (Synopsis)
"Oh, yes — I know you. There was a time you looked at the stars and dreamed of what might be." -Star Trek: Nemesis, spoken by Jean-Luc Picard The stars call to us through the ages, with each and every one holding the promise of a future for humanity beyond Earth. For generations, this was a mere…
The ten greatest steps of the last ten decades (Synopsis)
"Gamow was fantastic in his ideas. He was right, he was wrong. More often wrong than right. Always interesting; … and when his idea was not wrong it was not only right, it was new." -Edward Teller Considering what we know about our Universe today, it's hard to believe that just a century ago,…
Why Are We Made Of Matter And Not Antimatter? (Synopsis)
“If you see an antimatter version of yourself running towards you, think twice before embracing.” –J. Richard Gott III Everywhere we look in the Universe, we find that planets, stars, galaxies, and even the gas between them are all made of matter and not antimatter. Yet as far as we know, the laws…
A spectacular auroral show to ring in the New Year (Synopsis)
"You cannot rob me of free nature's grace, You cannot shut the windows of the sky Through which Aurora shows her brightening face." -James Thomson When the Sun emits a flare or a mass ejection in the direction of Earth, these fast moving particles are when Earth's magnetosphere and atmosphere…
Mostly Mute Monday: Overlapping, but not colliding galaxies (Synopsis)
"I know there is strength in the differences between us. I know there is comfort where we overlap." -Ani DiFranco The observable Universe is a big, big place. Some 46 billion light years in all directions, with hundreds of billions of galaxies inside, it's no wonder that we see stars and galaxies…
Comments of the Week #91: From Santa science to lonely galaxies
“This whole Santa Claus thing just doesn't make sense. Why all the secrecy? Why all the mystery? If the guy exists why doesn't he ever show himself and prove it? And if he doesn't exist what's the meaning of all this?” -Calvin, via Bill Watterson This is our last comments of the week for 2015, and…
Ask Ethan: How Big Was The Universe When It Was First Born? (Synopsis)
"They say it all started out with a big bang. But, what I wonder is, was it a big bang or did it just seem big because there wasn't anything else drown it out at the time?" -Karl Pilkington Looking out at the distant stars, galaxies and radiation in the Universe today, we've been able to determine…
The Loneliest Galaxy In The Universe (Synopsis)
"If the expansion of the space of the universe is uniform in all directions, an observer located in anyone of the galaxies will see all other galaxies running away from him at velocities proportional to their distances from the observer." -George Gamow When Einstein put forth his space-and-time…
The last great discovery of Apollo: Lunar Volcanic Glass! (Synopsis)
"It's like trying to describe what you feel when you're standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon or remembering your first love or the birth of your child. You have to be there to really know what it's like." -Harrison Schmitt They say that one of the most exciting phrases to hear in science is not…
Why string theory is not science (Synopsis)
"As of now, string theorists have no explanation of why there are three large dimensions as well as time, and the other dimensions are microscopic. Proposals about that have been all over the map." -Edward Witten Earlier this month, a conference was held devoted to the question of whether…
Why is it so hard to find a new particle? (Synopsis)
"I often feel a discomfort, a kind of embarrassment, when I explain elementary-particle physics to laypeople. It all seems so arbitrary - the ridiculous collection of fundamental particles, the lack of pattern to their masses." -Leonard Susskind When it comes to physics, there are a tremendous…
Mostly Mute Monday: Top 10 Bizarre Galaxy Pairs From Hubble (Synopsis)
"For me, the study of these laws is inseparable from a love of Nature in all its manifestations." - Murray Gell-Mann When you take a glimpse into the deep Universe, beyond the gas, dust, stars and planets of our own galaxy, you enter the realm of the galaxies. In general, they come in two types:…
The Physics of Santa Claus (Synopsis)
"Our family was too strange and weird for even Santa Claus to come visit... Santa, who was jolly - but, let's face it, he was also very judgmental." -Julia Sweeney Everyone loves to point out the holes in the Santa Claus theory. After all, how could one person with a sled, powered by eight…
Comments of the Week #90: from Spiral Galaxies to Quantum Gravity
"As far as extra dimensions are concerned, very tiny extra dimensions wouldn't be perceived in everyday life, just as atoms aren't: we see many atoms together but we don't see atoms individually." -Ed Witten As we approach the end of the year, Starts With A Bang looks ahead to what's…