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Philosophy
Examine life’s biggest questions, from ethics to existence, with curiosity and critical thinking.
The Earth is getting warmer, and humans are the cause. This is why. Let’s play pretend for a moment. Pretend, if you can, that you’ve never heard about the idea of […]
With 1.6 billion households in the world, how does Santa do it? With a little Christmas magic… and a lot of science! How does Santa Claus do it? In one long […]
It’s okay to be skeptical. That’s why we have evidence. In all of human history, only 24 people have ever flown to the vicinity of the Moon, traveling hundreds of […]
Einstein’s explanation is the only one that works. When Newton first proposed the law of universal gravitation, it marked the very first time that we realized the same rule governing how […]
We can go to deeper and deeper levels, finding more fundamental quantities as we do. But is there a truly fundamental quantity? What is the Universe, at a fundamental level, […]
At ground zero, Trinitite, the green, glassy substance found in the area, is still radioactive and must not be picked up. The Trinity Site was where the first atomic bomb […]
The line between science and pseudoscience is imperceptible to most. Here’s how you can catch it in yourself. When it comes to science, the first principle is that you must […]
The first identified visitor from another solar system gets its own Starts With A Bang podcast! In 2017, the incredible happened: for the first time in history, we were able to […]
Despite what Hawking told you, it really isn’t about particle-antiparticle pairs at all. Nothing in the Universe lives forever. All the stars that will ever form will someday burn out; distant […]
There may be a fundamental reason why time travel, backwards, is impossible. We’ve all had the dream of traveling back in time. Whether there’s a wrong we want to right, […]
Our existence is finite, but that’s no reason for despair. Here’s a version of the story we all should hear at least once. This world, and for that matter, the entire […]
For hundreds of millions of years, most of the starlight never made it through space. Here’s how that changed. Forming stars sounds like the easiest thing in the Universe to do. […]
Instead of eternal expansion, could we just be part of a universal cosmic cycle? There are few questions that can keep us up at night the way pondering the eventual fate […]
White dwarfs, neutron stars, and brown dwarfs aren’t actually stars at all. Here’s why. When it comes to stars, there’s a huge variety of different types out there. Our Sun is […]
If the Sun is 93 million miles away, why does sunlight filtering through the clouds or the trees spread out? Rays of sunshine are one of those natural sights that leave […]
LIGO’s enormous arms contract and expand as gravitational waves pass through them. But, puzzlingly, so does the light within them. For the past three years, humanity has known a new kind […]
Our biases, preferences, and ideas of simplicity and elegance can get in the way. Here’s a scientific way to cut through them all. What are the rules governing reality? If you […]
Our Universe may not be all there is, was, or ever will be, after all. There’s been a lot of speculative ideas put forth about the Multiverse, and I dare say […]
Did the Universe begin at time t=0? Did space and time emerge from that? The Universe, today, is expanding and cooling, as the volume of the Universe increases while the number […]
If our current laws of physics can’t predict what will happen, even probabilistically, we need something new. There are two theories we have that explain all the particles and their […]