We live in a time of information abundance, which far too many of us see as information overload. With the sum total of human knowledge, past and present, at our fingertips, we’re faced with a crisis of attention: which ideas should we engage with, and why? Big Think is an evolving roadmap to the best thinking on the planet — the ideas that can help you think flexibly and act decisively in a multivariate world.
A word about Big Ideas and Themes — The architecture of Big Think
Big ideas are lenses for envisioning the future. Every article and video on bigthink.com and on our learning platforms is based on an emerging “big idea” that is significant, widely relevant, and actionable. We’re sifting the noise for the questions and insights that have the power to change all of our lives, for decades to come. For example, reverse-engineering is a big idea in that the concept is increasingly useful across multiple disciplines, from education to nanotechnology.
Themes are the seven broad umbrellas under which we organize the hundreds of big ideas that populate Big Think. They include New World Order, Earth and Beyond, 21st Century Living, Going Mental, Extreme Biology, Power and Influence, and Inventing the Future.
Browse videos featuring experts across a wide range of disciplines, from personal health to business leadership to neuroscience.
Big Think’s contributors offer expert analysis of the big ideas behind the news.
Big Think’s Edge learning platform for career mentorship and professional development provides engaging and actionable courses delivered by the people who are shaping our future.
Cutting-edge physics in all its remarkable strangeness
You’ve probably been hearing a lot about the Large Hadron Collider in the news lately. After 16 years the LHC seems to be in the headlines each week, breaking speed, energy level, and other types of records right and left. In fact, just last month the accelerator broke its previous record by ...
The director of the census bureau in charge of marine species, called the Global Marine Species Assessment, has issued a warning about the deterioration of earth's coral reefs. It was stated that perhaps within 100 years we may see the total collapse of all the coral reefs around the country and ...
I would like to thank all the people who showed up on Thursday in New York to be part of filming Sci Fi Science, second season. We filmed two episodes of the program (about how to terraform Mars, and how to colonize the Milky Way galaxy) and the audience reaction was great. We had a wonderful ...
Many people were left gasping when President Obama unveiled his new plan for outer space, including his proposal to cancel NASA's Constellation program. It turns out that the great recession of 2008 and 2009 has claimed yet another victim, and this time it's the manned exploration of the Universe ...
Not long ago, a report quoting NASA scientists was issued by the National Academy of Science, the highest scientific advisory body to the United States Congress. The report said something that used to be unthinkable: our own sun could have a temper tantrum that would unleash a tsunami of radiation ...
As we mentioned in a previous post, Einstein himself was worried about the possibility that time travel was built into his General Theory of Relativity. In 1949, when his good friend Kurt Gödel showed that a rotating universe allowed for time travel, he was deeply worried. Gödel, in fact, would ...
For generations, the topic of invisibility has been of great interest. Although it was once dismissed as science fiction, it has now become reality on a small scale. Physics textbooks around the world must be rewritten and scientists must admit that they were wrong. For the first time, scientists ...
I have often been asked about my thoughts on the recently increased storm activity and global warming. The fact is, you cannot judge a book by its cover, so you cannot make any definitive statements one way or the other about global warming based on current storms, which are primarily local effects ...
I would put Albert Einstein among the 20 top people who have ever lived, in terms of their impact on our way of life. Kings, queens, and emperors have come and gone, without leaving a trace, but Einstein helped to create the world around us. Time Magazine called him the Person of the Century—I ...
It is likely that, within our lifetime, we will see a big earthquake ravage a populated area, such as northern Los Angeles, San Francisco, Tokyo, or Istanbul, to name a few major cities. These are earthquakes waiting to happen. It is inevitable that we will see a big one in the United States. It's ...
IMAX Hubble 3D, hitting the theaters on March 19, features the most famous space telescope of all, the Hubble, launched in April 1990. Soaring above the earth's atmosphere, it gives the clearest picture of the universe without atmospheric disturbances. Astronauts were sent to service the ...
It was Isaac Newton who gave us the first concrete picture of time. To him, it was like an arrow: once fired, it went unerringly towards its target, never wavering, never slowing down, never coming back. It was a common sense view that was shared by everyone back then. So one second on earth is one ...