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.
Scintillating images from around the cosmos
The Transit of Venus. Partial eclipses of the sun by the moon. The largest flare of this solar cycle. Comet Lovejoy,. These are some of the highlights of the last three years in the life of our star. And thanks to NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), we have a nearly unbroken record of these ...
Here is the Milky Way Galaxy as you have never seen it before. The European Southern Observatory (ESO) has just released a zoomable image representing the central concentration of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy that, if printed in full resolution, would be nearly 30 feet wide and over 20 feet tall ...
A team of astronomers at Johns Hopkins University recently used space and ground-based telescopes to capture the death of a star that was "shredded" by the gravity of a supermassive black hole. This violent event itself was no space oddity. Black holes routinely swallow stars. Yet it is rare ...
If you saw Martin Scorcese's film Hugo you will no doubt remember the homage to the iconic 1902 Georges Méliès film A Trip to the Moon . The film depicts a lunar voyage by six astronomers who travel in a bullet-shaped space capsule that hits the Man in the Moon square in the eye. A Trip to the ...
With its space shuttle program grounded, NASA has found a great way to stay relevant with its daily release of images and videos, which we are happy to serve up to you in this blog whenever we come across something particular spectacular in the cosmos. For instance, the video below is an animation ...
The Red Planet will be the closest distance to Earth in over two years tonight in an event called The Mars Opposition. That means martian features and polar caps will be as visible as it gets. Slooh, the robotic telescope that offers real-time web-based views of space, will be bringing you the ...
The largest solar storm in seven years is expected to peak tomorrow, threatening GPS signals and the electrical grid. The cloud of particles streaming from the sun is headed for the Earth at 4.5 million mph and is set to hit us at around 9:00 a.m. EST tomorrow. The faster the radiation travels ...