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

July 6, 2017
“There are two infinities that confuse me: the one in my soul devours me; the one around me will crush me” -Gustave Flaubert Last week, Donald Trump restored the National Space Council, promising to take America and the world to new heights in space. He also made some statements claiming that this…
July 5, 2017
"When you listen to a lecture, you should not have any idea of yourself. You should not have your own idea when you listen to someone. Forget what you have in your mind and just listen to what he says. To have nothing in your mind is naturalness. Then you will understand what he says. But if you…
July 4, 2017
"Eddington had needed to make significant corrections to some of the measurements, for various technical reasons, and in the end decided to leave some of the Sobral data out of the calculation entirely. Many scientists were suspicious that he had cooked the books. Although the suspicion lingered…
July 3, 2017
"This new insight may force us to rethink the whole cosmological context of how galaxies burn out early on and evolve into local elliptical-shaped galaxies. Perhaps we have been blind to the fact that early "dead" galaxies could in fact be disks, simply because we haven't been able to resolve them…
July 2, 2017
“Sometimes the silences, the gaps, tell us more than anything else.” -Peter Ackroyd Did you know that there's even more going on than before here at Starts With A Bang!? Yes, we have our articles at Forbes; yes, we have our Podcasts on Soundcloud; yes, we have our first book out and our second…
July 1, 2017
"I would argue that in any habitable zone that doesn't boil or freeze, intelligent life is going to emerge because intelligence is convergent." -Simon Conway Morris Someday, in the far distant future, the evolution of the Sun will cause it to heat up and emit so much energy that the Earth’s surface…
June 30, 2017
"By its very nature science knows no boundaries. Walling off any group, for any reason, from full participation damages the entire enterprise of science. We must be scientists without borders." -Rocky Kolb We normally think of “let there be light” as when the Universe got its start. In a particular…
June 29, 2017
"Space and time may have a structure as intricate as the fauna of a rich ecosystem, but on a scale far larger than the horizon of our observations." -Martin Rees On the largest scales, dark matter has been undoubtedly the most successful theory in modern cosmology for explaining a huge variety of…
June 28, 2017
"We hope that interested people will repeat our calculations and will make up their own minds regarding the significance of the results. It is obvious that "belief" is never an alternative to "understanding" in physics." -J. Creswell et al. Three times now, the LIGO collaboration has produced very…
June 27, 2017
"Nations, like stars, are entitled to eclipse. All is well, provided the light returns and the eclipse does not become endless night. Dawn and resurrection are synonymous. The reappearance of the light is the same as the survival of the soul." -Victor Hugo On August 21, 2017, the Moon will pass…
June 26, 2017
"There’s no difference between a pessimist who says, “Oh it’s hopeless, so don’t bother doing anything.” and an optimist who says, “Don’t bother doing anything, it’s going to turn out fine anyways.” Either way, nothing happens." -Yvon Chouinard Are the beautiful and iconic Pillars of Creation,…
June 25, 2017
“Already in my original paper I stressed the circumstance that I was unable to give a logical reason for the exclusion principle or to deduce it from more general assumptions. I had always the feeling, and I still have it today, that this is a deficiency.” -Wolfgang Pauli There's never a shortage…
June 24, 2017
"[Brown dwarfs] appear to live a more exciting life than we presumed. They are too big to be planets and two small to be stars, but it does appear that if you watch one it has very active events... there is action going on." -Lars Bildsten For every star that’s out there in the Universe, for every…
June 23, 2017
"That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence." -Christopher Hitchens 65 million years ago, a catastrophic impact from outer space caused the last great mass extinction on Earth, destroying 30% of the species that lived on our world at the time. These mass…
June 22, 2017
"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 Feynman There’s no doubt that LIGO has given us one of…
June 21, 2017
"Although we were initially quite skeptical that this planet could exist, as we continued to investigate its orbit and what it would mean for the outer solar system, we become increasingly convinced that it is out there." -Konstantin Batygin Last year, scientists Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown…
June 20, 2017
"Chapel Hill is a beautiful place, and I was wanting to get out of Livermore for an academic position, so we went there, both of us, as visiting research professors. After a few years I was given a regular professorship and Cecile was demoted to a lecturer." -Bryce DeWitt "Without being told it was…
June 19, 2017
"It shows you exactly how a star is formed; nothing else can be so pretty! A cluster of vapor, the cream of the milky way, a sort of celestial cheese, churned into light." -Benjamin Disraeli From here on Earth, most of the stars we see in the night sky are ancient, having departed from the star-…
June 18, 2017
“Many people today agree that we need to reduce violence in our society. If we are truly serious about this, we must deal with the roots of violence, particularly those that exist within each of us. We need to embrace 'inner disarmament,' reducing our own emotions of suspicion, hatred and hostility…
June 17, 2017
"In expanding the field of knowledge we but increase the horizon of ignorance." -Henry Miller You know it as the most fundamental law of relativity: that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. And yet, the observable Universe itself, which has been around for 13.8 billion years since…
June 16, 2017
"What's really exciting is what comes next. I think we're opening a window on the universe -- a window of gravitational wave astronomy." -Dave Reitze, executive director of LIGO It revolutionized our view of the Universe when the LIGO annoucements – and we’re up to three, now – came out. They…
June 16, 2017
“There is no such thing as perpetual tranquillity of mind while we live here; because life itself is but motion, and can never be without desire, nor without fear, no more than without sense.” -Thomas Hobbes It’s hard to believe, but despite being at rest here on the surface of Earth, we’re…
June 15, 2017
"There is, then, no water that is wholly of the Pacific, or wholly of the Atlantic, or of the Indian or the Antarctic. The surf that we find exhilarating at Virginia Beach or at La Jolla today may have lapped at the base of antarctic icebergs or sparkled in the Mediterranean sun, years ago, before…
June 14, 2017
"Not all chemicals are bad. Without chemicals such as hydrogen and oxygen, for example, there would be no way to make water, a vital ingredient in beer." -Dave Barry When we break out the big guns -- space telescopes like Hubble or James Webb -- we can see the Universe as it was billions of years…
June 13, 2017
"Success isn't a result of spontaneous combustion. You must set yourself on fire." -Arnold Glascow When someone makes a shot, it’s a little instinctive to want to give them the ball again to see if they’ll make another. If they make three or four in a row, you’ll really want to ride that ‘hot hand…
June 12, 2017
"This would be like an F8 tornado sweeping across the surface. These are winds on Mars that will never be seen again unless [there is] another impact." -Peter Schultz When you examine craters on the surfaces of worlds across the solar system, you find that there are rays emanating outward,…
June 11, 2017
“There are two types of people who will tell you that you cannot make a difference in this world: those who are afraid to try and those who are afraid you will succeed.” -Ray Goforth We've really investigated some amazing scientific stories this week here at Starts With A Bang! There's always so…
June 10, 2017
"Billions of years from now our sun, then a distended red giant star, will have reduced Earth to a charred cinder." -Carl Sagan “Bigger mass makes a bigger star,” you might be inclined to say. The smallest stars in size should be small because they have the least amount of material in them, while…
June 9, 2017
"People who work every day are kind of scared of things they don't understand." -Young Jeezy From Mercury out to Neptune, most of the worlds in the Solar System have moons, with a hitherto discovered population of around 200 known ones. Yet despite all of it, we don’t know of a single instance of a…
June 8, 2017
"The black holes collide in complete darkness. None of the energy exploding from the collision comes out as light. No telescope will ever see the event." -Janna Levin Whenever there’s a catastrophic, cataclysmic event in space, there’s almost always a tremendous release of energy that accompanies…