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

    Polls don’t identify the real science education problem

    Concerns that Americans do poorly when quizzed on factual scientific knowledge don’t address deeper issues of scientific understanding.

  2. Math

    Doctors flunk quiz on screening-test math

    Many doctors, and the news media, don’t understand that because of the statistics of screening tests, a test with 90 percent accuracy can give a wrong diagnosis more than 90 percent of the time.

  3. Quantum Physics

    Shor’s code-breaking algorithm inspired reflections on quantum information

    Twenty years ago, physicists met in Santa Fe to explore the ramifications of quantum information.

  4. Quantum Physics

    Quantum experts discuss the measurement problem: A transcript from 1994

    A fairly complete transcript of a discussion about quantum physics on May 19, 1994, the last day of a workshop in Santa Fe, N.M., evolves into a more general discussion of the interpretation of quantum mechanics and the quantum measurement problem.

  5. Quantum Physics

    Robert Redford film foretold Shor’s quantum computing bombshell

    Twenty years ago, Peter Shor showed how quantum computers could break secret codes, turning the movie Sneakers from fiction to fact.

  6. Cosmology

    Maybe time’s arrow needs ergodicity as well as entropy

    Explaining the arrow of time might require an equilibrium universe with hidden ergodic dynamics.

  7. Cosmology

    Cosmic question mark

    Two ways of measuring the universe’s expansion rate disagree by about 10 percent. One of the methods may be flawed. Or it could be that a hitherto unobserved phenomenon is at work.

  8. Cosmology

    Top 10 cosmological discoveries

    The cosmic microwave background radiation has played a part in many of cosmology’s greatest discoveries.

  9. Math

    Our Mathematical Universe

    Math is everywhere: medicine, sports, banking, gambling, National Security Agency espionage.

  10. Cosmology

    Inflation rides gravity waves into cosmological history

    The discovery of gravity waves in the cosmic microwave radiation signals the success of inflationary cosmology.

  11. Science & Society

    Top 10 scientists of the 13th century

    Modern science began to emerge in Western Europe centuries before the Scientific Revolution, thanks to a few scholars who were ahead of their time.

  12. Science & Society

    Medieval cosmology meets modern mathematics

    Applying modern math to Robert Grosseteste’s theory of the heavenly spheres reveals a medieval idea’s similarity to modern cosmology.