esiegel

Profile picture for user esiegel
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

Mobile, AL school system loses its mind
After just finishing my series on the last 100 years in astrophysics, I was surprised to read an article in Bust Magazine that seems like it ought to be from 100 years ago. You see, 100 years ago, segregating boys and girls was commonplace in schools. Not only that, but girls took "girl classes"…
2012: The Real "Milestone", The Real Danger
Doomsday in 2012? Please, I don't even have time for that. (Check out Ian O'Neill's work for a nail-in-the-coffin of those myths.) But there is a big milestone that we will reach right around 2012. Prior to the industrial revolution, the Earth's atmosphere was really ideal for supporting the wide…
Carnival of Space #113 is here on Scienceblogs!
I'm not responsible for this one, though! Head on over to Steinn's page, Dynamics of Cats to see this week's Carnival of Space in full. Sure, I wrapped up my series on the last 100 years, but you'll want to take a look at my top 3 from this week's Carnival: 1. Chandra's 10th anniversary: it was a…
Weekend Diversion: Oh Captain, My Captain!
There is so much good music out there that never, ever hits the mainstream. But if you dig a little bit, you can not only find some good ones, occasionally you hit the gold mine. Such is the case with The Bridge, a Baltimore-based band that I'll almost definitely come see September 5th when they…
Should we go to Mars or not?
Recently, I expressed an opinion on this site in favor of a manned mission to Mars. I was met with many comments -- both positive and negative -- discussing this position. So I'd like to, first off, find out what your opinions on it are: I realize that there are many other deciding factors on…
Nietzche and Astronomy?
Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster. And if you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you. --F. Nietzsche That's supposed to be a metaphor, right? Not so, says NGC 1097. In visible light, it just looks like a barred spiral galaxy: But damn if the abyss isn't gazing…
The Last 100 Years: The 2000s and WMAP
The last 100 years have brought us from a Universe no bigger than the Milky Way ruled by Newton's gravity to a vast, expanding one with hundreds of billions of galaxies, covered in dark matter, beginning with the big bang, which was likely caused by inflation, and which will end in a freezing cold…
The coolest trick for eclipse photography ever
Although many of the best sites for eclipse viewing -- such as Shanghai, China -- were clouded out during this early morning, an old high school friend of mine in Taiwan had a chance to view an outstanding partial solar eclipse, which is something that most of us will get to see in our lifetimes.…
The Best Eclipse of the Century is Tomorrow!
That's right, the absolute best eclipse of our lifetimes is going to occur tomorrow! First off, total Solar Eclipses are rare enough, and spectacular when they happen. After all, a total solar eclipse allowed us to first test Einstein's General Relativity! A total Solar Eclipse happens when the…
A Charity Extra! Going Above and Beyond
As many of you know, I am raising money and volunteer time for charity by shaving my head. Yes, I'm nervous about it, and yes, I'm definitely going to do it once we get 100 donors. If you'd like to donate, some fantastic charities that I can recommend are: Heifer International: providing livestock…
Happy Moonday!
Today: July 20th, 2009. The 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. The very first time mankind walked on the Moon. From liftoff, to walking down the lunar landing module for the first time, to some of the most iconic images in all of human history: It brings up a sense of wonder…
Weekend Diversion: A Charity Challenge!
I was driving to work one day this past week, thinking about how to make some positive change in this world, while this song -- Lochs of Dread -- by Béla Fleck was playing: And a great idea hit me. You see, all over my town, small, local, community-based non-profit organizations (such as museums,…
The Anthropic Principle: Good or Evil, Useful or Useless?
Understanding the Universe requires a lot more than just knowing some advanced mathematics, and even more than knowing how to apply that math. It requires a knowledge of natural history, and an understanding of the requirements for allowing that history to happen. In other words, the laws of…
Apollo landing sites: 40 years later!
I'll keep this simple, as you can get longer writeups at Universe Today, Bad Astronomy, and the NASA site, but a NASA spacecraft currently orbiting the Moon just released images of five of the six Apollo landing sites. Why am I so excited about this? Because you can see the Earth-junk we left there…
The Last 100 Years: 1998 and the accelerating Universe!
By the 1990s, we knew an awful lot about the Universe. You can check out what the greatest discoveries were (in my opinion) from the 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. By this point, we understood the origin of the Universe as well as we understand it today, knew about dark…
Science: What is it really all about?
In the wake of the release of Unscientific America, a lot of discussion has ensued as to how scientifically literate we are, how scientifically literate we need to be, and what to do about science education in America. There are a lot of interesting perspectives out there, and I'd like to…
What happens when things go too fast?
The coolest things about science are often at the frontiers. We love to press the limits of nature: to cool things down as close as possible to absolute zero, to raise energies as high as possible, and to speed them up as fast as possible. But when it comes to speed, there's an absolute limit: the…
Weekend Diversion: The Power of Periphery
It's time for an easy weekend for everyone. To kick it off, here's a song that almost everyone knows of, by the Eagles. Only, the Eagles didn't write it. Jackson Browne was screwing around in his flat with this song that "wasn't quite done" according to him. He played it for Glen Frey, and was…
Meet our Second Moon!
The inner Solar System is a pretty bizarre place. Think about the giant planets in our Solar System -- the Jovian planets -- that weigh in from tens to hundreds the mass of Earth. These giant balls of gas are orbited by all sorts of interesting things, from moons so giant that they have their own…
Go Look At The Moon!
This is the coolest thing online I've seen in a long time. A team of amateur astronomers took over 1000 pictures of tiny areas of the Moon. 288 of them were chosen and mosaiced together. They describe the result far better than I do: The end result is a high resolution 87.4 megapixel image of the…
The Last 100 Years: 1987, a Supernova, and the luckiest physicist ever
By the 1980s, our view of the Universe was pretty close to what it is today. We had confirmed the Big Bang Theory and even had some understanding of what must've caused the Big Bang. There were some mysteries around, such as dark matter, the age of the Universe, and the solar neutrino problem, but…
How to Fake your own Moon Landing
Okay, so you've seen the famous photos from the Apollo Moon landings: And you've been around the block enough to know why we really landed on the Moon. But let's say you wanted, for some reason, to stage your own fake jaunt on the Moon. The band Rammstein did an excellent job with the first 30…
The Last 100 Years: 1979 and Before the Big Bang
We have come so far in the last 100 years, and so has our picture of the Universe. From an island galaxy ruled by Newton's gravity and classical electromagnetism, we've come through the discovery of general relativity, the expanding Universe, the need for dark matter, the big bang, the synthesis of…
Weekend Diversion: A New Kind of Hero
I've only recently become musically acquainted with the artist Slaid Cleaves, born in Maine and living in Texas. This weekend, I present to you a heartbreaking song, Lydia, about a kind, wise old woman who can't quite pull her life together after the death of her son. Oh, Lydie, let him go. The boy…
Could we Garden on Mars?
Earlier this week, the most obvious scientific news in recent memory was reported: there's Uranium on the Moon. This has been, pretty much, a slam-dunk since Apollo 11. Why? Because we've brought moonrocks back to Earth, and we've analyzed them thoroughly. What did we find? That they're made of…
Second Light: Herschel and Hubble together
Just a few weeks ago, the Herschel Telescope was launched into space and successfully deployed. Herschel is larger than the Hubble Space Telescope, but instead of measuring visible light, it measures far-infrared light. This means that, when you look at any object in the Universe, the Hubble Space…
The Last 100 years: 1969 and the Final Frontier
There's no doubt that physics and astronomy was booming in the 1960s. The model that protons and neutrons were made of quarks was proposed and validated, the most powerful nuclear device of all time was detonated, and the Cosmic Microwave Background was discovered, validating the Big Bang. (Not to…
Carnival of Space #109 is live!
Last week, I was lucky enough to get to host the Carnival of Space. This week, the honor goes to Jennifer Ouellette at Twisted Physics, and my article on the 1950s and Fred Hoyle gets top billing! There are a bunch of other highlights to check out. Here are my top 3 CoS picks of the week: 1. Ever…
Water in Space: What Happens?
The Earth is one of those extremely rare, special places in the Universe where water can exist, stably, as a liquid. So much of it exists here on Earth, that if you were to add up all the oceans on Earth together, it would weigh more than 10^18 tonnes, more massive than the biggest asteroid ever,…
Weekend Diversion: The Real Rosie the Riveter
All the day long whether rain or shine she's a part of the assembly line she's making history working for victory Rosie the Riveter! One of the most iconic images, spawned by this song: is that of Rosie the Riveter. For the first time in the United States, women were not only entering the…