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.
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What's the Big Idea? "It is impossible to predict where the digital universe is going," writes technology historian George Dyson in the preface to his new book Turing's Cathedral , "but it is possible to understand how it began." It is from that contention that Dyson sets out to tell the origin ...
What's the Big Idea? Every second of every day, more data is being created than our minds can possibly process. Therein lies the great paradox of today's knowledge economy. Is it all just sound and fury, or can the increased speed of information actually lead to greater knowledge? To answer ...
What's the Big Idea? The history of scientific discovery, in Bill Nye's words: "Copernicus goes, the sun is the center, not the earth. Everybody’s like what, dude? Yeah. The earth goes around the sun. Oh, now everything adds up. Galileo says hey, you know, we’re not the only planet with a moon ...
The near earth asteroid 2012 DA14 discovered last year is not going to hit Earth next year, scientists say. Phew. And yet, it will still be coming in way too close for comfort (17,000 miles away--closer than many orbiting satellites), and may hit us the next time around, in 2020, or on another ...
Bill Nye has always mixed science and comedy, dating back to his early career when he balanced his day job as an engineer at Boeing with his nighttime routine as a stand-up comic. Later Nye was able to combine those passions in his award-winning PBS show Bill Nye the Science Guy . Another passion ...
What's the Big Idea? In a 2011 interview, physicist Stephen Hawking declared, "I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail." Of course, the brain is not a computer in the literal sense of the word, but the brain-as-computer metaphor is a powerful one. Long ...
What's the Big Idea? Shall we go hungry or go cold? That is the unfortunate question that some developing countries have had to face as food crops such as wheat and corn have been used to create bio fuels. While some of these 'first generation' bio fuels have been produced with some success ...
There's been an alarming spike in lethal shark attacks on sea otters by sharks off California's Central Coast, and no one seems to know why. While attacks by sharks -- mostly Great Whites -- accounted for approximately 10 percent of sea otter deaths in the 1990s, today that number is 30 percent ...
What's the Big Idea? On September 11, 2001, John Horgan saw the smoke where the Twin Towers had once been visible in the New York skyline, and he wondered what he would tell his kids, aged 6 and 8. In 2012, Horgan has a powerful message: his children will live to see a world without war ...
What's the Big Idea? In 2001, the human genome was published online for all to see: at once a Nobel-worthy scientific breakthrough, a testament to international collaboration, and a fundamental shift in the way biological research would be conducted for the foreseeable future. The price tag? A ...
"And I'll know my song well before I start singing" -Bob Dylan, A Hard Rain's A Gonna Fall What's the Big Idea? With SETI's search for extraterrestrial life getting a second lease on life, two questions must be raised: How do we make contact? And how do we make meaningful contact? That is ...
What's the Big Idea? Michael Gazzaniga, one of the world's leading researchers in cognitive neuroscience, describes the mystery of free will: “If you think about it this way, if you are a Martian coming by earth and looking at all these humans and then looking at how they work you wouldn’t—it ...
What's the Big Idea? On average, students pay $35,000 a year for the privilege of being educated at a private nonprofit American college. In December of 2011, indebtedness among college graduates reached an all-time high of one trillion dollars. But with unemployment among 16 to 29-year-olds ...
What's the Big Idea? "Your Gravity Theory Sucks!" Margaret Wertheim was surprised to find this comment on an order form for a self-published book called The Other Theory of Physics, written by James Carter, a trailer-park owner in Enumclaw, WA. Unlike other so-called "outsider physicists" she ...
What's the Big Idea? Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free... Immigration is an integral part of the story Americans tell themselves about who they are. A paper in the Journal of Politics found that more than 90% of Americans believe that just thinking of ...