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Our mission is to answer the biggest questions of all, scientifically.
What is the Universe made of? How did it become the way it is today? Where did everything come from? What is the ultimate fate of the cosmos?
For most of human history, these questions had no clear answers. Today, they do. Starts With a Bang, written by Dr. Ethan Siegel, explores what we know about the universe and how we came to know it, bringing the latest discoveries in cosmology and astrophysics directly to you.
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Ethan Siegel is an award-winning PhD astrophysicist and the author of four books, including The Grand Cosmic Story, published by National Geographic.
AI makes its first meaningful breakthrough in theoretical physics
Making more complicated, more precise predictive calculations tells us what real experiments should deliver. AI just surpassed humans at it.
The expanding Universe, CMB, and large-scale structure revealed the Big Bang. New nucleosynthesis advances deliver unprecedented precision.
The observable Universe is 92 billion light-years in diameter. These pictures put just how large that is in perspective.
We strongly suspect we aren't alone in the Universe, but so far, we haven't found anyone. What determines when we'll finally make contact?
Most time travel stories involve changing the past to create a better future. "Donnie Darko" subverts that expectation, and a whole lot more.
Predicted back in the 1960s, 2012's discovery of the Higgs boson completed the Standard Model. But the biggest Higgs puzzle still persists.
Although many of Einstein's papers revolutionized physics, there's one Einsteinian advance, generally, that towers over all the rest.
Millisecond pulsars are the Universe's most accurate natural clocks. A pulse change, thought rare, just occurred twice in the closest one.
From a primordial soup of particles, atoms eventually emerged. What happened to make it so, and could things have worked out any other way?
All matter particles can act as waves, and massless light waves show particle-like behavior. Can gravitational waves also be particle-like?
The matter that creates black holes won't be what comes out when they evaporate. Will the black hole information paradox ever be solved?
In 1982, an experiment showed unprecedented evidence for exotic matter: magnetic monopoles. But without reproducibility, it didn't hold up.
As the Earth spins and wobbles on its axis and revolves elliptically around the Sun, each day differs from the last. "24 hours" isn't right.
In general relativity, white holes are just as mathematically plausible as black holes. Black holes are real; what about white holes?
The evidence that the Universe is expanding is overwhelming. But how? By stretching the existing space, or by creating new space itself?
We experience time as real. But what if it's only an illusion: an illusion that's inherently relative? Does time fundamentally even exist?
There's a speed limit to the Universe: the speed of light in a vacuum. But you can beat the speed of light. Just travel through a medium!
Generations ago, cosmologists asserted that the Universe might not just be the same in all directions, but at all times. But is that true?
Today's Milky Way only forms stars slowly. Our galactic center, where the star-forming rate is highest, gives a unique window into our past.
Every proton contains three quarks: two up and one down. But charm quarks, heavier than the proton itself, have been found inside. How?
If you look into a mirror, you'll notice that left-and-right are reversed, but up-and-down is preserved. The reason isn't what you think.