Tom Siegfried

Tom Siegfried

Contributing Correspondent

Tom Siegfried is a contributing correspondent. He was editor in chief of Science News from 2007 to 2012, and he was the managing editor from 2014 to 2017. He is the author of the blog Context. In addition to Science News, his work has appeared in Science, Nature, Astronomy, New Scientist and Smithsonian. Previously he was the science editor of The Dallas Morning News. He is the author of four books: The Bit and the Pendulum (Wiley, 2000); Strange Matters (National Academy of Sciences’ Joseph Henry Press, 2002);  A Beautiful Math (2006, Joseph Henry Press); and The Number of the Heavens (Harvard University Press, 2019). Tom was born in Lakewood, Ohio, and grew up in nearby Avon. He earned an undergraduate degree from Texas Christian University with majors in journalism, chemistry and history, and has a master of arts with a major in journalism and a minor in physics from the University of Texas at Austin. His awards include the American Geophysical Union's Robert C. Cowen Award for Sustained Achievement in Science Journalism, the Science-in Society award from the National Association of Science Writers, the American Association for the Advancement of Science-Westinghouse Award, the American Chemical Society’s James T. Grady-James H. Stack Award for Interpreting Chemistry for the Public, and the American Institute of Physics Science Communication Award.

All Stories by Tom Siegfried

  1. Science & Society

    Steven Weinberg looks back at rise of scientific method

    Steven Weinberg’s new book ‘To Explain the World’ illustrates the difficulty of the development of modern science.

  2. Quantum Physics

    Top 10 scientific mysteries for the 21st century

    Solving the Top 10 scientific mysteries facing the 21st century will not be all fun but could be mostly games.

  3. Quantum Physics

    Physicists debate whether quantum math is as real as atoms

    Physicists debate whether quantum states are as real as atoms or are just tools for forecasting phenomena.

  4. Quantum Physics

    Bell’s math showed that quantum weirdness rang true

    50 years ago, John Bell proved a theorem that led the way to establishing the weirdness of quantum physics.

  5. Science & Society

    Science’s good, bad, ugly year

    In the race for Top Science Story of 2014, some of the contenders stumbled before reaching the finish line.

  6. Science & Society

    The medieval mentality of modern science

    Today’s scientists grapple with many of the same issues that stumped their medieval predecessors.

  7. Science & Society

    Top 10 science popularizers of all time

    Since antiquity, some notable thinkers have served society by translating science into popular form.

  8. Humans

    Human ancestor Lucy celebrates 40th anniversary

    Paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson recalls the discovery 40 years ago of the human ancestor known as Lucy.

  9. Math

    In science, popularity breeds unreliability

    Popularity can mean unreliability both in science news coverage and within research itself.

  10. Cosmology

    Answers to questions posed by cosmology to philosophy

    Tough questions about the philosophy of cosmology have answers; they just might not be right.

  11. Math

    Reproducing experiments is more complicated than it seems

    Statisticians have devised a new way to measure the evidence that an experimental result has really been reproduced.

  12. Science & Society

    Top 10 science anniversaries in 2014

    2014 is a rich year for scientific anniversaries, from the birth of Vesalius to quantum factoring.