Ethan Siegel

Last updated
Ethan R. Siegel
Born
Bronx, New York City [1]
NationalityAmerican
Education Northwestern University (BA)
University of Florida (PhD)
Known forStarts With a Bang! blog
Scientific career
FieldsTheoretical astrophysics and cosmology
Institutions Lewis & Clark College
Thesis Cosmological perturbations and their effects on the universe
Doctoral advisor James N. Fry
Website https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/

Ethan R. Siegel is an American theoretical astrophysicist and science writer, who studies the Big Bang theory. In the past he has been a professor at Lewis & Clark College and a blogger at Starts With a Bang, on ScienceBlogs and also on Forbes.com since 2016.

Contents

Early life and education

Siegel was born to "a Jewish postal worker" [2] and grew up in the Bronx, where he attended Bronx High School of Science until 1996. Siegel graduated from Northwestern University with a B.A. degree in physics, classics and integrated science in 2000, and went on to earn his Ph.D. degree in astrophysics from the University of Florida in 2006. [1]

Career

Siegel worked at Fermilab in 1997. [3] He received his undergraduate degree in physics, classics and integrated science from Northwestern University in June 2000. [4] [1] [5] He was unsure whether to continue studying and took the GRE Physics Test "just in case". [6] He taught in high school in Houston [2] and at King Drew Magnet High School of Medicine and Science in inner-city Los Angeles for a year and though he "liked some aspects" of teaching he then decided he did not want to teach any longer, had a crisis and, influenced by Carl Sagan's Cosmos , [6] he went back into academia to study the universe. [1] [7] [8]

He studied theoretical cosmology, in particular cosmological perturbation theory, [9] at graduate school at the University of Florida with advisor Prof. Jim Fry from 2001. He received his PhD in 2006. [1] [7] [8] [5] During his graduate studies he was a teaching assistant and lecturer in physics, he sat on the graduate student affairs committee, and he was an assistant coordinator for REU students. [8]

Siegel was a teaching assistant in undergraduate general physics at the University of Wisconsin in Spring 2007 [10] and then took up a post-doctoral research post at the University of Arizona. In 2008, Siegel moved with his then fiancée to Portland, Oregon, after deciding to not pursue an ambitious research career with long hours and instead focus on science outreach and have a "fuller, richer life". [11] He taught at the University of Portland and then Lewis & Clark College, where he was a visiting assistant professor. [7] [11] [12] He later became science and health editor for Trapit. [11] He moved to Toledo, Washington, in late 2014, while continuing to occasionally teach at Lewis & Clark. [7] He became a full-time self-employed science writer in May 2018. [13]

Outreach

In December 2015 Siegel published his popular science book Beyond the Galaxy: How Humanity Looked Beyond Our Milky Way and Discovered the Entire Universe with World Scientific, which he said is for "people who are curious and intelligent but don’t have scientific backgrounds". [7] In the book, Siegel critiques the MOND theory of gravity, arguing "its failure to meet the criteria of reproducing the successes of the already-established leading theory means that it has not yet risen to the status of scientifically viable." [14] Greg Laden compared it to Isaac Asimov's "The Intelligent Man's Guide to the Physical Sciences", [15] physicist Sabine Hossenfelder said it "is the missing link between cosmology textbooks and popular science articles", [16] and PhD student Jonah Miller said it is "one of those rare books that not only communicates scientific ideas, but communicates what science itself is all about." [17]

In 2012 and 2015, he was the Science Guest of Honor and toastmaster at MidSouthCon, [18] [19] where he promoted the joy of science. [20] In April 2017, he was the Science Guest of Honor at Norwescon 40. [21] Siegel wears costumes such as a wrestler or superhero to attract attention to his science communication. [15]

Blog

"The Universe is out there, waiting for you to discover it."

— Starts With a Bang tagline [22]

Siegel's blog Starts With a Bang started in January 2008 at startswithabang.com [23] and then ScienceBlogs from March 2009 to October 2017. [24] The blog included a monthly podcast and Siegel posts answers to questions from readers in the "Ask Ethan" series. He hosted guest bloggers, including Sabine Hossenfelder and Paul Halpern. [22] Topics he covered include adaptive optics, using lasers in astronomy to adjust for atmospheric turbulence, the detection of gravitational waves from colliding black holes by LIGO, and why quantum entanglement does not allow faster-than-light communication. [6] By January 2011, his blog had been viewed 2 million times. [25]

Described as "beautifully illustrated and full of humour", his blog won the 2010 Physics.org award for best blog, judged by Adam Rutherford, Alom Shaha, Gia Milinovich, Hayley Birch, Lata Sahonta, and Stuart Clark and the people's choice award, [26] and his post "Where Is Everybody?" came third in the 2011 3 Quarks Daily science writing awards, judged by Lisa Randall, winning a "Charm Quark" for "[taking] on the challenge of simplifying probability estimates without sacrificing the nature of the enterprise or suppressing the uncertainties involved". [27] [22] Siegel headed the RealClearScience list of top science bloggers in 2013, as his "unmatched ability to describe the nearly indecipherable made him an easy choice for #1." [28] Siegel also wrote a column for NASA, The Space Place. [22] He continues to contribute content on Forbes website.

Works

Siegel first published in physics in 2003, working mainly on dark matter and structure formation. [29] Significant works include:

Siegel also writes articles beyond astrophysics. For example, following the publication of Science article by prominent US and UK researchers advocating for further investigation of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, [30] Siegel advocates that Covid-19 did not come from Chinese labs. [31]

Personal life

Siegel met his wife in Madison, Wisconsin. [2] He has a large beard and moustache and wears a kilt; [7] [2] he entered the West Coast Beard and Mustache competition in Portland in 2011. [32] He is "often asked why he doesn’t look like a scientist". [7] Siegel is Jewish and an atheist. [33] He plays online chess [34] [35] and is a fan of My Little Pony. [36]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Big Bang</span> Physical theory

The Big Bang is a physical theory that describes how the universe expanded from an initial state of high density and temperature. The notion of an expanding universe was first scientifically originated by physicist Alexander Friedmann in 1922 with the mathematical derivation of the Friedmann equations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Physical cosmology</span> Branch of cosmology which studies mathematical models of the universe

Physical cosmology is a branch of cosmology concerned with the study of cosmological models. A cosmological model, or simply cosmology, provides a description of the largest-scale structures and dynamics of the universe and allows study of fundamental questions about its origin, structure, evolution, and ultimate fate. Cosmology as a science originated with the Copernican principle, which implies that celestial bodies obey identical physical laws to those on Earth, and Newtonian mechanics, which first allowed those physical laws to be understood.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cosmic microwave background</span> Trace radiation from the early universe

The cosmic microwave background, or relic radiation, is microwave radiation that fills all space in the observable universe. With a standard optical telescope, the background space between stars and galaxies is almost completely dark. However, a sufficiently sensitive radio telescope detects a faint background glow that is almost uniform and is not associated with any star, galaxy, or other object. This glow is strongest in the microwave region of the radio spectrum. The accidental discovery of the CMB in 1965 by American radio astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson was the culmination of work initiated in the 1940s.

In physics, the fundamental interactions or fundamental forces are interactions in nature that appear not to be reducible to more basic interactions. There are four fundamental interactions known to exist:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Multiverse</span> Hypothetical group of multiple universes

The multiverse is the hypothetical set of all universes. Together, these universes are presumed to comprise everything that exists: the entirety of space, time, matter, energy, information, and the physical laws and constants that describe them. The different universes within the multiverse are called "parallel universes", "flat universes", "other universes", "alternate universes", "multiple universes", "plane universes", "parent and child universes", "many universes", or "many worlds". One common assumption is that the multiverse is a "patchwork quilt of separate universes all bound by the same laws of physics."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Universe</span> Everything in space and time

The universe is all of space and time and their contents. It comprises all of existence, any fundamental interaction, physical process and physical constant, and therefore all forms of matter and energy, and the structures they form, from sub-atomic particles to entire galactic filaments. Since the early 20th century, the field of cosmology establishes that space and time emerged together in the Big Bang 13.787±0.020 billion years ago and that the universe subsequently expanded. Today the universe has expanded into an age and size that is physically only part of the observable universe, currently about 93 billion light-years in diameter, while the spatial size of the entire universe is by definition unknown and theorized to be possibly infinite.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ultimate fate of the universe</span> Theories about the end of the universe

The ultimate fate of the universe is a topic in physical cosmology, whose theoretical restrictions allow possible scenarios for the evolution and ultimate fate of the universe to be described and evaluated. Based on available observational evidence, deciding the fate and evolution of the universe has become a valid cosmological question, being beyond the mostly untestable constraints of mythological or theological beliefs. Several possible futures have been predicted by different scientific hypotheses, including that the universe might have existed for a finite and infinite duration, or towards explaining the manner and circumstances of its beginning.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Plasma cosmology</span> Non-standard model of the universe; emphasizes the role of ionized gases

Plasma cosmology is a non-standard cosmology whose central postulate is that the dynamics of ionized gases and plasmas play important, if not dominant, roles in the physics of the universe at interstellar and intergalactic scales. In contrast, the current observations and models of cosmologists and astrophysicists explain the formation, development, and evolution of large-scale structures as dominated by gravity.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Neil Turok</span> South African cosmologist

Neil Geoffrey Turok is a South African physicist. He has held the Higgs Chair of Theoretical Physics at the University of Edinburgh since 2020, and has been director emeritus of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics since 2019. He specializes in mathematical physics and early-universe physics, including the cosmological constant and a cyclic model for the universe.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jim Peebles</span> Canadian-American astrophysicist and cosmologist

Phillip James Edwin Peebles is a Canadian-American astrophysicist, astronomer, and theoretical cosmologist who was Albert Einstein Professor in Science, emeritus, at Princeton University. He is widely regarded as one of the world's leading theoretical cosmologists in the period since 1970, with major theoretical contributions to primordial nucleosynthesis, dark matter, the cosmic microwave background, and structure formation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Flatness problem</span> Cosmological fine-tuning problem

The flatness problem is a cosmological fine-tuning problem within the Big Bang model of the universe. Such problems arise from the observation that some of the initial conditions of the universe appear to be fine-tuned to very 'special' values, and that small deviations from these values would have extreme effects on the appearance of the universe at the current time.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cosmology</span> Scientific study of the origin, evolution, and eventual fate of the universe

Cosmology is a branch of physics and metaphysics dealing with the nature of the universe, the cosmos. The term cosmology was first used in English in 1656 in Thomas Blount's Glossographia, and in 1731 taken up in Latin by German philosopher Christian Wolff in Cosmologia Generalis. Religious or mythological cosmology is a body of beliefs based on mythological, religious, and esoteric literature and traditions of creation myths and eschatology. In the science of astronomy, cosmology is concerned with the study of the chronology of the universe.

An exotic star is a hypothetical compact star composed of exotic matter, and balanced against gravitational collapse by degeneracy pressure or other quantum properties.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hadron epoch</span> Period in the evolution of the early universe

In physical cosmology, the hadron epoch started 20 microseconds after the Big Bang. The temperature of the universe had fallen sufficiently to allow the quarks from the preceding quark epoch to bind together into hadrons. Initially, the temperature was high enough to allow the formation of hadron/anti-hadron pairs, which kept matter and anti-matter in thermal equilibrium. Following the annihilation of matter and antimatter, a nano-asymmetry of matter remains to the present day. Most of the hadrons and anti-hadrons were eliminated in annihilation reactions, leaving a small residue of hadrons. Upon elimination of anti-hadrons, the Universe was dominated by photons, neutrinos and electron-positron pairs. One refers to this period as the lepton epoch.

Peter Coles is a theoretical cosmologist at Maynooth University. He studies the large scale structure of our Universe.

Particle physics is the study of the interactions of elementary particles at high energies, whilst physical cosmology studies the universe as a single physical entity. The interface between these two fields is sometimes referred to as particle cosmology. Particle physics must be taken into account in cosmological models of the early universe, when the average energy density was very high. The processes of particle pair production, scattering and decay influence the cosmology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Future of an expanding universe</span> Future scenario if the expansion of the universe will continue forever or not

Current observations suggest that the expansion of the universe will continue forever. The prevailing theory is that the universe will cool as it expands, eventually becoming too cold to sustain life. For this reason, this future scenario once popularly called "Heat Death" is now known as the "Big Chill" or "Big Freeze".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chronology of the universe</span> History and future of the universe

The chronology of the universe describes the history and future of the universe according to Big Bang cosmology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dark energy</span> Energy driving the accelerated expansion of the universe

In physical cosmology and astronomy, dark energy is a proposed form of energy that affects the universe on the largest scales. Its primary effect is to drive the accelerating expansion of the universe. Assuming that the lambda-CDM model of cosmology is correct, dark energy dominates the universe, contributing 68% of the total energy in the present-day observable universe while dark matter and ordinary (baryonic) matter contribute 26% and 5%, respectively, and other components such as neutrinos and photons are nearly negligible. Dark energy's density is very low: 7×10−30 g/cm3, much less than the density of ordinary matter or dark matter within galaxies. However, it dominates the universe's mass–energy content because it is uniform across space.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sabine Hossenfelder</span> German theoretical physicist and YouTuber (born 1976)

Sabine Karin Doris Hossenfelder is a German theoretical physicist, philosopher of science, author, science communicator, and YouTuber. She is the author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, which explores the concept of elegance in fundamental physics and cosmology, and Existential Physics: A Scientist’s Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 Siegel, Ethan R. (2006). Cosmological perturbations and their effects on the universe (PDF). University of Florida. p. 125.
  2. 1 2 3 4 "Starts With A Bang". ScienceBlogs. Retrieved January 4, 2017.
  3. ↑ "The Topsy-Turvy World of Ethan Siegel". 1998. Retrieved January 5, 2017.
  4. ↑ "Graduate program placement". Department of Physics, Northwestern.
  5. 1 2 "Homepage of Ethan Siegel". University of Florida. August 29, 2005. Retrieved January 5, 2017.
  6. 1 2 3 Martellaro, John (June 6, 2016). "TMO Background Mode: Interview With Astrophysicist Dr. Ethan Siegel". The Mac Observer.
  7. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Osowski, Kaylee (May 1, 2016). "Toledo astrophysicist publishes book exploring the universe". Chronicle.
  8. 1 2 3 Siegel, Ethan (January 10, 2007). "Career interests". University of Florida. Retrieved January 5, 2017.
  9. ↑ Siegel, Ethan (January 10, 2007). "Research". University of Florida. Retrieved January 5, 2017.
  10. ↑ "Department of Physics Teaching Assistants". University of Wisconsin. 2007. Retrieved January 7, 2017.
  11. 1 2 3 Korn, Peter (January 4, 2012). "Where are all of Portland's bright ideas?". Portland Tribune.
  12. ↑ "Faculty". Lewis and Clark College. 2010. Retrieved January 5, 2017.
  13. ↑ Siegel, Ethan (May 11, 2018). "Sharing today's big milestone". Patreon.
  14. ↑ Pomeroy, Ross (May 20, 2016). "Do We Need to Revise General Relativity?". RealClearScience. Retrieved January 5, 2017.
  15. 1 2 Haubrich, Mike (May 26, 2016). "There was a bang - Ethan Siegel convinces us that dark matter is real". Ikonokast. Archived from the original on January 4, 2017. Retrieved December 6, 2016.
  16. ↑ Hossenfelder, Sabine (December 31, 2015). "Book review: "Beyond the Galaxy" by Ethan Siegel". Backreaction. Retrieved January 5, 2017.
  17. ↑ Miller, Jonah (December 12, 2015). "Book review: Beyond the Galaxy". The Physics Mill. Retrieved January 5, 2017.
  18. ↑ "MidSouthCon30". MidSouthCon. Retrieved January 3, 2017.
  19. ↑ "MidSouthCon33". MidSouthCon. Retrieved January 3, 2017.
  20. ↑ Beifuss, John (March 20, 2015). "Far Out!: Fantasy & sci-fi celebrated at MidSouthCon". Memphis Commercial Appeal. Retrieved January 5, 2017.
  21. ↑ "NWC40 Science Guest of Honor: Dr. Ethan Siegel". Norwescon. April 17, 2016. Retrieved January 2, 2017.
  22. 1 2 3 4 Gaal, Rachel (October 2016). "Virtual Think Tanks: Physicists Who Blog". APS News. Retrieved January 2, 2017.
  23. ↑ Siegel, Ethan (January 17, 2008). "Setting up for the blogosphere". Starts With a Bang. Retrieved January 5, 2017.
  24. ↑ "Welcome to Starts With A Bang!". Starts With a Bang. ScienceBlogs. March 31, 2009. Retrieved January 5, 2017.
  25. ↑ "Whiz Bang Blog". The Chronicle Magazine. Lewis and Clark College. January 18, 2017. Retrieved January 7, 2017.
  26. ↑ "The physics.org web awards", physics.org, 2010, retrieved January 2, 2017
  27. ↑ Raza, S. Abbas (June 20, 2011). "The Winners of the 3 Quarks Daily 2011 Science Prize". 3 Quarks Daily. Retrieved January 2, 2017.
  28. ↑ "Top 10 Science Bloggers". RealClearScience. April 25, 2013. Retrieved January 2, 2017.
  29. ↑ "Astrophysics Publication Database". Harvard.
  30. ↑ "Did the coronavirus leak from a lab? These scientists say we shouldn't rule it out".
  31. ↑
  32. ↑ Fenley, Marissa (February 4, 2011). "All About Beards, Mustaches and Chops". The Pioneer Log. Retrieved January 10, 2017.
  33. ↑ Siegel, Ethan (August 7, 2011). "Weekend Diversion: Opening up about religion and beliefs". Starts With a Bang. Retrieved January 4, 2017.
  34. ↑ "Chessplayer ethansiegel". Gamesknot. Retrieved January 5, 2017.
  35. ↑ Siegel, Ethan (2008). "First question!". Starts With a Bang. Retrieved January 5, 2017.
  36. ↑ Beifuss, John (March 17, 2015). "Sci-fi fans to flock to 34th MidSouthCon". Memphis Commercial Appeal. Retrieved January 5, 2017.
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