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

May 13, 2008
There is a very techincal paper this morning by Martin Bojowald that asks the question, How Quantum Is The Big Bang? Let me break it down for you. If you took a look at empty space and zoomed in on it, looking at spaces so small that they made a proton look like a basketball, you'd find that space…
May 13, 2008
Sometimes, I publish things on this website that are not entirely correct (and when I do, I'll own up to it). Sometimes other people do on theirs. There are bad ways and good ways to argue these points, ranging from name-calling to explicitly explaining where the flaws are in one's arguments, and…
May 12, 2008
What the heck has this world come to? All over the internet, this picture of an Orangutan trying to fish with a stick has been shown: But what's the story behind this? Is this evidence that humans are not unique among the Great Apes as tool-users? Not quite. According to the Daily Mail, this is an…
May 10, 2008
I'm not someone who gets as excited about science-fiction space shows as many other science bloggers, but I am a fan of the current Battlestar Galactica and, especially, of Star Trek: The Next Generation. But there's one man who stands out as the hero of Star Trek: TNG, and it's the seasoned, savvy…
May 8, 2008
Space, if nothing else, is an awfully pretty place. This week over at Space Cynic lies the 53rd Carnival of Space. Some of the highlights of this weeks Carnival include the following: Cosmic Chocolates -- Japanese chocolates designed on the Planets. The Space Elevator -- We're still a long way…
May 8, 2008
Let's say we're having a nice day here on Earth; the Sun is shining, the clouds are sparse, and everything is just looking like a peach: And then Lucas goes and tells me, Oh my God, Ethan! It's Armageddon! An asteroid is coming straight for us! You've got to stop it! Really? Me? Well, how would I…
May 7, 2008
The American Association of Physics Teachers just published a study of 1,000 likely U.S. voters about science, religion, evolution, and creationism. The results are frightening. Here are some of the "highlights" of their study: 38% of Americans are in favor of the teaching of religion in public…
May 6, 2008
(This is adapted from my public lecture, Afraid of the Dark: How We Know What We Can't See.) Let's go back over 200 years ago, to 1781. William Herschel (left) discovered the planet Uranus, noticing that an object, as bright as a star, was actually moving relative to the other stars. The other…
May 5, 2008
Hector writes in and asks about someone from Sheffield in the UK who says that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will create Dark Matter: The massive ATLAS detector will measure the debris from collisions occurring in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) which recreates the conditions found in the early…
May 2, 2008
Clearly, neither the man nor the bull below is headed for anything good in their attempt to walk on water, and for that matter, neither is this poor, bristling cat, but what about this reptile? Unbelievably, this lizard actually can walk on water! And without using any surface tension tricks…
May 2, 2008
Can you believe that I had a fight today with someone who's been dead for over 350 years, and I'm losing? -- Ethan, yesterday Of course you can believe it, when the man I'm fighting with is Johannes Kepler. I don't get a chance to tell you about my research very often, mostly because it's still a…
April 30, 2008
The one-year anniversary edition of the Carnival of Space is up at Why Homeschool? If only more homeschoolers were into space, Astronomy, and science in general, the United States would be a far superior place, I'm sure! Thanks to Henry Cate for starting the Carnival and coming back to host it…
April 30, 2008
But I didn't want one! Stop your whining, Earthlings. We have a serious question to answer, courtesy of Tamara: What’s the moon like below its surface, moving into the interior? And what’s the current thought on its formation? Well, we do know a lot about the Moon's insides the same way we know…
April 29, 2008
No, not because it was too young to drink! Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics were looking at some X-ray objects, and discovered something really weird: a very bright X-ray source moving out of a galaxy at nearly 3,000 kilometers/second! This thing is a goner. If…
April 28, 2008
And if the band you're in starts playing different tunes I'll see you on the dark side of the Moon. One of my favorite readers, Zrinka, asks us why we're only able to see one side of the Moon from Earth. Seriously, look at the different phases; we always see the same side of the Moon: How does…
April 28, 2008
Old man Dave writes to me about his back problems: The spine. I want to know about the spine. I know you are not that kind of PHD but still……. I’ve had back problems most of my adult life. It seems to me if we were “intelligently” designed that we might have a more efficient, and less troubling,…
April 27, 2008
Dear Reader(s): This is Ethan, and I'm writing this to you to let you know that I owe you an apology. I have gotten so excited with the idea of bringing the story of the Universe to you -- to tell you how we got from the birth of the Universe to the present day, to tell you what the world, galaxy,…
April 26, 2008
Stop wastin' my time. You know what I want. You know what I need, or maybe you don't. Do I have to come right flat out and tell you everything?Gimme some money! My fellow Americans, are you impatient about getting your "stimulus package" from the government? First off, a lot of people are going to…
April 24, 2008
Even creationists have said that if you find something that's alive now that's over 6000 years old, it would prove to them that the Earth is at least that old. Previously, the oldest tree in the world was thought to be a Bristlecone Pine in California, known as the Methuselah tree, at 4,840 years…
April 24, 2008
So as a full member of both the American Astronomical Society and the American Physical Society, I get sent issues of the magazine Physics Today. Well, I was going through the April issue, when I saw this article: Cosmic Sound Waves Rule by Daniel J. Eisenstein and Charles L. Bennett That first…
April 24, 2008
(Thanks to Starts With A Bang! reader benhead.) The Hubble Space Telescope has released some beautiful images of colliding galaxies in a huge collection! Here are some of my favorites, with my very own names for them (real name in parentheses). We'll start with the Glowing Arrow (Arp 148): The…
April 24, 2008
Warning: Crazy talk ahead. Some of you may remember that I wrote about inflation and why its alternatives fail awhile back. Apparently, Louise Riofrio didn't get the memo. When there's misinformation about cosmology out there, it's up to me to set the record straight. (And I am not alone.) Let me…
April 23, 2008
Since the dawn of time man has yearned to destroy the sun. - C. M. Burns There's no need to stop at the Sun, though. Since yesterday was Earth day, I thought it was only appropriate to spend today telling you how not only to destroy the Earth, but to effectively destroy the entire Universe. To tell…
April 22, 2008
As you may have noticed from yesterday's unusual post, today is Earth Day! I thought I'd share with you some of my favorite pictures from space of it, including the famous photograph from Apollo 8 known as Earthrise: This combination shot made from NASA’s Terra satellite and NOAA’s Geostationary…
April 21, 2008
What makes earthquakes? Although there are many causes, including volcanoes, the most common thing that causes them are tectonic motions, which also cause tsunamis. But as valuable as it is to understand other planets in our solar system and in other star systems, sometimes it's important to…
April 19, 2008
Sometimes, gravity and motion has the power to mesmerize me. I found this online game called "compulse" which was so much fun, that I spent about 90 minutes this week just playing this game until I had beaten every level on the "pro" setting. Yikes. (My score is 104 under par, 8 under pro.) And so…
April 18, 2008
Remember how I told you earlier this week that DAMA was going to announce that they found dark matter, even though the signal that they found is not consistent with other experiments? Looks like my powers of predicting the future are pretty damned good. They have a new plot with more data showing…
April 18, 2008
Bret Underwood, a friend of mine from my time in Madison, WI, saw my post on String Theory, and took issue with my statement that it wasn't testable. I'm still standing behind what I said, but let's address what Bret has to say. I donât understand your argument above for why string theory is…
April 17, 2008
What is the future of this website? I'm going to be creating videos for the web about the Universe. I'll be answering questions ranging from what the Universe is like today to how it got to be that way. I'm going to address every step that we know of, from the Big Bang up to the present day. And…
April 17, 2008
Nothing gets past you, does it? A scientific paper came out earlier this week, and I took a look at it, sighed, and Jamie asked me, "What?" And I said to her, "When I see bad science, it just makes me a little bit frustrated and sad." Of course, I had no intention to write about it. But then Starts…