Imagine, for a moment, that you recently discovered you are an opera lover. A friend dragged you to “Aida” last year and you were enraptured. The same friend took you to “Don Giovanni” and you melted as the first ominous notes of the overture filled the hall. You’d like to harness your new-found ...

One of the things that has been going on in contemporary physics for the last really 15 or 20 years is that physicists seem to be in some sense trying to present an alternative to God.  We all know Stephen Hawking’s famous line from the end of A Brief History of Time that when we know this theory ...

Republicans have been on the losing side of a lot of debates recently. In the past year or so, long-standing, deeply held GOP positions against gun control, same-sex marriage, higher taxes on the rich and humane immigration legislation have seen steep declines in the estimation of the public. And ...

Outsider science is the scientific parallel of what is often called folk art, or outsider art. It’s an interesting thing that folk art has now become very popular and there are whole magazines devoted to it and galleries and collectors, but in the early 20th century it was very controversial ...

I first met the Dalai Lama in 2000 at his headquarters in Dharamshala, in the northern part of India.  And I had absolutely no interest in the Dalai Lama. I only went because I was invited to talk to him as a scientist, as a part of a group of five. And I knew I could invite a silent observer. And ...

Recent studies suggest that Americans might be the worst research subjects on the planet. As Ethan Watters put it recently, “social scientists could not possibly have picked a worse population from which to draw broad generalizations. Researchers had been doing the equivalent of studying penguins ...

Since the standards-based model of education overtook American public schools a generation ago, the answer to this question has been simple: prepare students for college and get them ready to be productive participants in the workforce. The new Common Core Standards Initiative — already adopted by ...

If the magician, comedian and outspoken atheist Penn Jillette had one question for God, what would it be? "Just how hip are you?" Jillette asked in a recent Big Think interview, addressing God directly. He expanded on this question as such: What kind of super hip, surrealist, ultra ...

Are you convinced that your moral and political views are the right ones? If you were to lay out all of your views and examine them, would they fit together in a coherent package? Are you open to new ideas that run contrary to your intuitions? In my last post I explored Bertrand Russell’s ...

Yesterday, nearly two thousand people “liked” this quote posted by Big Think on Facebook: Several subscribers appreciated the irony in Russell’s quip. Here are two: Below, I’ll return to the irony Thomas, Nancy and a few other Big Think Facebook perusers noticed — by the way ...

What’s The Big Idea? A 1993 paper in Nature announced that subjects listening to Mozart displayed increased cognitive activity through “enhanced spatial-temporal reasoning.” All the sudden, people started running to the local record store to pick up Wolfgang’s greatest hits. Search “Mozart” and ...

Penn Jillette is a larger-than-life figure in every way, including but hardly limited to his imposing physical stature. He's of course best known as one of the world's most famous living magicians, and on stage with his partner Teller, he has the cheerful swagger of a carnival barker, revealing how ...