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

The Last Goodbye
October 29, 2017
What better way to say farewell than with a slew of costume pictures from this year's (coming) Halloween? Happy Halloween 2017! From Ethan Siegel and Starts With A Bang. Keep looking to the Universe. And we'll have a lifetime of wonderful things to still explore. Goodbye, Scienceblogs,…
Ask Ethan: Why Did Light Arrive 1.7 Seconds After Gravitational Waves In The Neutron Star Merger?
October 28, 2017
"Delay is the deadliest form of denial." -C. Northcote Parkinson Every massless particle and wave travels at the speed of light when it moves through a vacuum. Over a distance of 130 million light years, the gamma rays and gravitational waves emitted by merging neutron stars arrived offset by a…
Five Discoveries In Fundamental Physics That Came As Total Surprises
October 27, 2017
“On what can we now place our hopes of solving the many riddles which still exist as to the origin and composition of cosmic rays?” –Victor Francis Hess It’s often said that advanced in physics aren’t met with “eureka!” but rather with “that’s funny,” but the truth is even stranger sometimes.…
Even while the world suffers, investing in science is non-negotiable
October 26, 2017
“I am looking at the future with concern, but with good hope.” –Albert Schweitzer Every so often, the argument comes up that science is expendable. That we’re simply investing too much of our resources — too much public money — into an endeavor with no short-term benefits. Meanwhile, there’s…
Merging Neutron Stars Deliver Deathblow To Dark Matter And Dark Energy Alternatives
October 25, 2017
"Dark matter is interesting. Basically, the Universe is heavier than it should be. There's whole swathes of stuff we can't account for." -Talulah Riley One of the most puzzling facts about the Universe is that 95% of the energy in it, in the forms of dark matter and dark energy, are completely…
Dressing Up Science: Richard Feynman And The Costume Parties Of Al Hibbs (Synopsis)
October 24, 2017
"I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there." -Richard Feynman Scientists have long had a reputation for being uptight, serious, and even killjoy personalities. But 50+ years ago, Richard Feynman was forcing everyone who felt that way to challenge their…
Star Trek: Discovery Goes Psychic & Psychedelic in 'Lethe': Season 1, Episode 6 Review (Synopsis)
October 23, 2017
"To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves." -Federico García Lorca In an episode filled with Vulcan mindmelds, Klingon treachery, a spectacular nebula, themes of racial purity, and PTSD, you’d think all the ingredients were there for a…
Comments of the Week: Final edition?
October 22, 2017
“You endure what is unbearable, and you bear it. That is all.” -Cassandra Clare Well, the cat's out of the bag. A little over a week ago, Scienceblogs announced to us writers that they no longer had the funds to keep the site operational, and so they would be shutting down. They asked us to keep…
Ask Ethan: How sure are we that the Universe is 13.8 billion years old?
October 21, 2017
“Normal science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend almost all their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like.” -Thomas S. Kuhn For all of human history, the biggest questions have fascinated us. Where did the Universe come…
Seeing One Example Of Merging Neutron Stars Raises Five Incredible Questions
October 20, 2017
"O. Hahn and F. Strassmann have discovered a new type of nuclear reaction, the splitting into two smaller nuclei of the nuclei of uranium and thorium under neutron bombardment. Thus they demonstrated the production of nuclei of barium, lanthanum, strontium, yttrium, and, more recently, of xenon and…
Why don't we have artificial gravity in space?
October 19, 2017
"Designing a station with artificial gravity would undoubtedly be a daunting task. Space agencies would have to re-examine many reliable technologies under the light of the new forces these tools would have to endure. Space flight would have to take several steps back before moving forward again…
The Hubble Space Telescope Is Falling (Synopsis)
October 18, 2017
"When we meet real tragedy in life, we can react in two ways - either by losing hope and falling into self-destructive habits, or by using the challenge to find our inner strength." -Dalai Lama Orbiting at hundreds of miles above Earth’s atmosphere, you’d think the Hubble Space Telescope would be…
Why Neutron Stars, Not Black Holes, Show The Future Of Gravitational Wave Astronomy
October 16, 2017
"This is going to have a bigger impact on science and human understanding, in many ways, than the first discovery of gravitational waves. We're going to be puzzling over the observations we've made with gravitational waves and with light for years to come." -Duncan Brown Detecting black holes and…
Astronomy’s ‘Rosetta Stone’: Merging Neutron Stars Seen With Both Gravitational Waves And Light
October 16, 2017
"It’s becoming clear that in a sense the cosmos provides the only laboratory where sufficiently extreme conditions are ever achieved to test new ideas on particle physics. The energies in the Big Bang were far higher than we can ever achieve on Earth. So by looking at evidence for the Big Bang, and…
Star Trek: Discovery's 'Choose Your Pain' Finally Feels Like Star Trek; Season 1 Episode 5
October 15, 2017
"You are... six years old. You are weak and helpless! You cannot... hurt me!" -Captain Picard, a badass, while being tortured Star Trek has always been a way for us to look at the best and worst aspects of humanity, often through our confrontations with alien races. Different aspects of our fears,…
Comments of the Week #180: From the planets Kepler missed to the NASA photos that changed the world
October 15, 2017
“We do not realize what we have on Earth until we leave it.” -Jim Lovell Well, the Scienceblogs comments are still on the fritz, requiring me to manually un-spam them one-at-a-time, but Starts With A Bang! is still going strong with some fabulous stories based on the best knowledge we have! This…
Ask Ethan: Is The Universe Finite Or Infinite?
October 14, 2017
“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.” -William Blake When it comes to the ultimate question of the size of the Universe, we have to look to greater…
5 NASA Photos That Changed The World
October 13, 2017
"Truth in science, however, is never final, and what is accepted as a fact today may be modified or even discarded tomorrow. Science has been greatly successful at explaining natural processes, and this has led not only to increased understanding of the universe but also to major improvements in…
The Multiverse Is Inevitable, And We're Living In It
October 12, 2017
"It’s hard to build models of inflation that don't lead to a multiverse. It’s not impossible, so I think there’s still certainly research that needs to be done. But most models of inflation do lead to a multiverse, and evidence for inflation will be pushing us in the direction of taking [it]…
Science’s Greatest Lesson For Humanity Is ‘How To Be Wrong’
October 11, 2017
“Right is right even if no one is doing it; wrong is wrong even if everyone is doing it.” -Augustine of Hippo Science isn't the easiest endeavor you can undertake. Sure, the rewards are tremendous: you can wind up understanding any phenomenon in the Universe as well (or better) than any human has…
Missing Matter Found, But Doesn’t Dent Dark Matter (Synopsis)
October 10, 2017
"There are stars leaving the Milky Way, and immense gas clouds falling into it. There are turbulent plasmas writhing with X- and gamma-rays and mighty stellar explosions. There are, perhaps, places which are outside our universe. The universe is vast and awesome, and for the first time we are…
Star Trek: Discovery Is Smart-Sounding Scientific Nonsense, Season 1, Episode 4 Recap
October 9, 2017
"You were always a good officer. Until you weren't." -Saru, from Star Trek: Discovery Science is full of great ideas and brilliant discoveries, and some of those more recent ones have made their way into the popular consciousness. TED talks, popular blogs and online magazines, and Facebook pages…
Comments of the Week #179: From mirrorless telescopes to the physics ideas that must die
October 8, 2017
“It’s easier to hold onto a bad idea if you never share it, and it’s harder to defend one if you let it out.” -Victor LaValle After catching up with a big double-dose of our comments last week, Starts With A Bang! is here again with the latest! For those of you looking forward to my newest book,…
Ask Ethan: How Many Planets Did NASA's Kepler Miss?
October 7, 2017
"How vast those Orbs must be, and how inconsiderable this Earth, the Theatre upon which all our mighty Designs, all our Navigations, and all our Wars are transacted, is when compared to them." -Christiaan Huygens With a field-of-view encompassing 150,000 stars, NASA’s Kepler mission delivered an…
Five Brilliant Ideas For New Physics That Need To Die, Already
October 5, 2017
“Some people believe holding on and hanging in there are signs of great strength. However, there are times when it takes much more strength to know when to let go and then do it.” -Ann Landers The history of physics is littered with brilliant ideas that have revolutionized how we look at the…
Inflation Isn't Just Science, It's The Origin Of Our Universe
October 5, 2017
"There's no obvious reason to assume that the very same rare properties that allow for our existence would also provide the best overall setting to make discoveries about the world around us. We don't think this is merely coincidental." -Guillermo Gonzalez Beginning in 1979, a new idea arose in…
Are Space, Time, And Gravity Just Illusions?
October 4, 2017
“Something is happening here and this is going to have an impact.” -Robert Dijkgraaf, on Verlinde's work There are many attempts out there to reconcile the quantum field theories that describe the electromagnetic and nuclear forces with general relativity, which describes the gravitational force.…
The Nobel Doesn’t Mean Gravitational Wave Astronomy Is Over; It’s Just Getting Good
October 3, 2017
"Wormholes are a gravitational phenomena. Or imaginary gravitational phenomena, as the case may be." -Jonathan Nolan Yes, we detected gravitational waves, directly, for the first time! Just days after Advanced LIGO first turned on, a signal of a 36 solar mass black hole merging with a 29 solar mass…
Gravitational Waves Win 2017 Nobel Prize In Physics, The Ultimate Fusion Of Theory And Experiment
October 2, 2017
"Well, I walked into Building 20 and looked in at the various little labs. There was a bunch of people doing something that looked to me to be sort of interesting, and since I knew all this electronics, I asked them, “Look, can you use a guy?” And I sold myself off as a technician for about two…
The Suspect Science Of Star Trek: Discovery, 'Context Is For Kings,' Season 1, Episode 3
October 2, 2017
"If I die trying but I’m inadequate to the task to make a course change in the evolution of this planet…okay I tried. The fact is I tried. How many people are not trying. If you knew that every breath you took could save hundreds of lives into the future had you walked down this path of knowledge,…