Ethan Siegel

@startswithabang.bsky.social

5842 Followers 898 Following

Cosmologist, science communicator, author, speaker, and longtime writer of Starts With A Bang. Not the next Carl Sagan; the first Ethan Siegel.

Nike's greek fail, substituting the wrong greek letters for their line of Nike Air Pegasus shoes.
Multiple choice featuring the rigged answers: Yes, Definitely, Absolutely!!!
Climate graph showing RCP (SSP) analyses for 1.9, 2.6, 4.5, 7.0, and 8.5 W/m^2 of climate forcing.
This chart shows a bar graph of cancelled federal advisory committees across four agencies that fund scientific research: DHHS, NSF, NASA, and DoE. No prior year saw more than 10 estimated committees cancelled until 2025, which saw over 100 such cancellations.
A meme showing Americans as a line of resistors, with Democrats appearing below as a superconductor.
Graph showing the Trump administration's plundering and eliminating of US science in 2025.
Uncle Iroh quote saying, "You must never give in to despair. Allow yourself to slip down that road and you surrender to your lowest instincts. In the darkest times, hope is something you give yourself. That is the meaning of inner strength."
Just your friendly neighborhood mantis.
An inside look at four individual page spreads from the book The Grand Cosmic Story, featuring artwork, page titles, intricate text, and statistics about the Universe.
Cover of the book The Grand Cosmic Story with pre-order now text beneath it, and a beautiful galactic background behind it.
An orange hued Sun turns the landscape of a sea plane on a lake-like body of water into a sunset landscape, with thin, wispy clouds low on the horizon top-lit by the sunlight.
If we hadn’t done the experiment, we would never have known where the root of the “problem” was when it comes to the calculation of the muon’s magnetic moment. We would have been left with two theoretical “camps,” one using a data-driven approach to the hadronic vacuum polarization and the other using a lattice QCD-driven approach. They would have gotten different answers, and they would have each reported small errors and uncertainties, while the cumulative results, overall, didn’t even overlap. We would have had two predictions, inconsistent with one another, both claiming to be correct, and we would have no experimental data to tell us which one, if either, was correct. Theory tells you what to expect, but if you have different methods of calculating your predictions and they don’t agree with one another, you have to perform the experiment. Without it, we would have had two results — a full 5-sigma apart from one another — and no way to know who was right. It’s by performing the critical experiment to the necessary precision that we can actually uncover what it is that nature is telling us.
A panel from the Dr. Seuss book "Yertle the Turtle," where the arrogant and exploitative Yertle is knocked off of his throne of stacked turtles by a simple burp at the bottom, and winds up falling into the mud as a result.
Jon Lomberg's illustration of the Milky Way, with spiral arms rotating clockwise as seen from galactic North and the Kepler mission's field-of-view shown looking towards the left of the image.
Text from the article that reads: "Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi. They may be the gentle philosopher whose name is in the Blue Book, or Bill from City College to whom democracy gave a chance to design airplanes—you’ll never make Nazis out of them. But the frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success—they would all go Nazi in a crisis."
General Raven was a treasonous general in Fullmetal Alchemist, who attempted to take over the northern fortress at Briggs. Their general, Olivia Mira Armstrong, slashed him and buried him in concrete, making him part of the "foundation" for Briggs.
Jupiter's moon Io seen in animation in infrared as the Juno spacecraft dives past it in orbit. Dozens of volcanic hot spots can be seen clearly on the surface of Io.