My most recent articles are listed on the Bowler Hat Science blog, linked in the sidebar in reverse chronological order. All publications below are listed in alphabetical order. Please contact me if you would like to commission a piece!
Books
- Failure to Launch (Iron Circus Comics) is an anthology of comics about technologies and ideas that for various reasons just didn’t happen. In collaboration with artist Maki Naro, I wrote a comic about the first attempt to bring wind power to the world in the early 20th century, an effort that tangentially included my great-grandfather. UPDATE: the project is fully funded! Stay tuned for more information!
- Midwest Architecture Journeys (Zach Mortice, ed.). This anthology from Belt Publishing includes essays on architects and buildings throughout the American Midwest, including a chapter from me about the quirky design of Fermilab, the particle physics facility outside of Chicago.
Articles, features, contributions
- Is this real life or a simulation? (January 21, 2014)
- Cognitive celebrity: Albert Einstein was a genius, but he wasn’t the only one – why has his name come to mean something superhuman? (July 23, 2014)
- The Universe is Ringing (also in July 2015 print edition)
- The First Sighting of a Black Hole (in the February 2017 print edition)
- Could Future Telescopes Do Without the Mirror? (February 2018 print edition)
- Penguin Spotting, and Other Cool Satellite Tricks (April 2018 print edition)
- The Equivalence Principle under a MICROSCOPE (comic with Maki Naro, September 14, 2022)
- Flexible Electronics, Heal Thyself (January 29, 2019)
- Black Holes Could Reveal New Ultralight Particles (February 4, 2019)
- Ultrafast Oscilloscope for Ultrashort Electron Beam (April 9, 2019)
- Persistence of Gravitational-Wave Memory (April 25, 2019)
- Most recent feature: Life, Uh, Finds a Way — Applying Lessons from Evolution to Go to Mars (January 2018)
- Series on dark matter
- The quiet search for dark matter deep underground (July 8, 2014) — a visit to the LUX dark matter detector in South Dakota
- Where is the dark matter? (July 28, 2014) — mapping the location of dark matter in relation to visible matter
- Exploring the monstrous creatures at the edges of the dark matter map (September 30, 2014) — what if the most popular hypothesis about the nature of dark matter is wrong?
- Author page
- Yerkes Observatory is Closing Its Doors (March 20, 2018)
- Astronomy Without Light (October 13, 2017)
- How Does Sound Travel on Mars? (April 24, 2017)
- The Dawn of a New Era In Science (February 11, 2016) — news feature on the first direct detection of gravitational waves by LIGO
- The Eccentric Design and Cutting-Edge Science of Fermilab (October 2, 2019): my essay from Midwest Architecture Journeys
- Why We’ll (Probably) Never Be Able to Teleport (December 31, 2019)
- How Big (or Small) Can a Black Hole Get? (December 21, 2019)
- What If Earth Stopped Turning? (December 20, 2019)
- What’s the Shape of the Universe? A New Study Is Sparking Debate (November 22, 2019)
- Representative article: Are We Closer to Finding a Fifth Dimension? (February 8, 2018)
- Complete article listing
DSM Observer
- The World Is Not Ready for Asteroid Mining, But It Needs To Be (April 16, 2020)
- The Cities of the Future Could Be Built From Mushrooms (December 27, 2017)
- We (Probably) Can’t Tell Whether Mars Has Life (March 10, 2023); also in the Eos May 2023 print magazine
- Sample story: The Problem With Naming Observatories For Bigots (June 11, 2015)
- complete list of contributions
Galileo’s Pendulum (personal science blog)
- If you love a flower found on a star… (about The Little Prince‘s asteroid)
- The problem of Richard Feynman
- Big Telescopes Reveal the Maelstrom Around a Black Hole
- Me, Ludwig Boltzmann, Ludwig Boltzmann and I
- Imaginary Numbers are Real
- Europa’s Salty Seas (May 5, 2015)
“Exploring Black Holes” series (content for Medium members):
- Frozen Stars and Gravitational Dynamos (July 24, 2017)
- The Care and Feeding of Black Holes (August 28, 2017)
- Seeing the Invisible (September 6, 2017)
- Gravity Be Not Proud (October 25, 2017)
Mercury is the quarterly magazine for members of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. These issues are not available to non-members, but I can share the text of my contributions upon request.
- General Relativity Falls Down, Again (Winter 2019 issue)
- The Gravity of Climate Change (Fall 2018 issue)
- Billions of Black Holes (Summer 2018 issue)
- 20,000 Alien Worlds Await (Spring 2018 issue)
- Feature article: What is life? (October 20, 2015); since Mosaic no longer exists, I have republished the whole article on my own site
- Related content:
- Interview and panel discussion on This Week in Science (October 21, 2015): YouTube / podcast
- Feature article: How to Clock a Glacier (March 12, 2015)
- Feature article: What’s 250 Million Light-Years Big, Almost Empty, and Full of Answers? (August 7, 2014)
- Representative post: How to Map a Galaxy When You’re Right in the Middle of It (December 23, 2013)
- Complete list of contributions
- NASA probe about to leave for asteroid Bennu and bring bits home (Sept. 6, 2016)
- Our Vanishing Sky (comic with Maki Naro, published in the print issue “Nature”)
- Of Plutonium and Pluto (comic with Maki Naro, May 24, 2021; also published in the print issue “Power”)
- Waiting for Herd Immunity is Not the Answer (comic with Maki Naro, September 14, 2020)
- When “Peanuts” Went All-In on Vaccinations (comic with Maki Naro, September 9, 2019)
- When Good Scientists Go Bad (comic with Maki Naro, May 15, 2019)
- Who Owns an Asteroid? (comic with Maki Naro, February 11, 2019)
- All contributions to The Nib
- The Shadow of a Black Hole (August 21, 2015)
- Do We Need to Rewrite General Relativity? (June 18, 2015)
- Does Antimatter Fall Up or Down? (November 19, 2014)
- What is the Shape of a Proton? (November 5, 2014)
- The Astronomical Particle Colliders That Put Our Own to Shame (July 21, 2014)
- Most recent: “Studying impossible systems with analogues” (August 2018 print issue; full text online)
- Feature article: “Deducing how dinosaurs moved” (February 2017 print issue, full text online)
- Complete list of Physics World contributions
- The science of how diseases spread (February 20, 2020)
- Quantum teleportation is real, but it’s not what you think (March 29, 2019)
- Something called ‘squeezed light’ is about to give us a closer look at cosmic goldmines (September 4, 2018)
- “Time vs. Space”: text by Rachel Feltman and Matthew R. Francis, illustrated by Matei Apostolescu (September 2017 print issue)
- Police Who Tear Gas Abortion-Rights Protesters Could Induce Abortion (July 20, 2022)
- Weird X-Rays Spur Speculation about Dark Matter Detection (January 26, 2015)
- Most recent contribution: The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence-Generated Art (November 1, 2022)
- A Mathematical Tale of Fibers, Fluids, and Flagella (October 3, 2022)
- Multiscale Models Shed Light on Tuberculosis (October 3, 2022)
- The Mathematical Machinery That Makes Cells Move (September 1, 2022)
- Can Science Speak Truth to Power? (June 1, 2022)
- Protecting Privacy With Synthetic Data (May 2, 2022)
- Biological Near-symmetries Explain the Similarity and Diversity of Life (April 1, 2022)
- Complete list of SIAM News contributions
- The Short, Violent Lives of Magnetars (December 2021 print issue)
- Most recent contribution: NASA’s Embarrassing Pronouns Fumble (March 10, 2022)
- Author page
- When Carl Sagan Warned the World About Nuclear Winter (November 15, 2017)
- How Albert Einstein Used His Fame to Denounce American Racism (March 3, 2017)
- The Hidden Connections Between Darwin and the Physicist Who Championed Entropy (December 15, 2016)
- “Weak Lensing” Helps Astronomers Map the Mass of the Universe
- The GRACE to tackle climate change (May-June 2022 print issue, also available online)
- 50 images of the universe from the Hubble Space Telescope (April 20, 2020)
- 40 major glaciers in danger of melting (April 14, 2020)
- 2019 in space: 25 notable missions from the last year (December 19, 2019)
- Space discoveries from the year you were born (September 27, 2019)
- Most recent: How big is a neutron star? (September 1, 2020)
- Profile: Of symmetries, the strong force and Helen Quinn (January 27, 2015)
- Author page with complete list of contributions
Vox
- Why are so few Nobel Prizes awarded to women? (comic with Maki Naro, December 10, 2019)
The Week
- The growing crisis in cosmology (February 21, 2020)
- The incredible story behind our first image of a black hole (April 10, 2019)
Older contributions
- Representative article: Will we ever… create a black hole in the laboratory? (July 16, 2013)
- Complete list of contributions
- Representative post: Parallel Earth and the Evil Matthew Hypothesis (September 9, 2013)
- Complete list of contributions
- How to Name a Planet (April 24, 2013)
- Vivons-nous dans une simulation? (Translation of “Is this real life or a simulation” with some additional material)
Scientific American Guest Blog
- What we know about black holes (September 2, 2011)
- What does the new double-slit experiment actually show? (June 7, 2011)
365 Days of Astronomy Podcast
- The biggest things in the Universe (audio / transcript)
- Seeing through gravity’s lens (audio / transcript)
- Taking Measure: A ‘New’ Most Distant Galaxy (October 23, 2013)
- Some Planet-like Kuiper Belt Objects Don’t Play “Nice” (January 16, 2014)
Bowler Hat Science 
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