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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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Time is for real, argues the theoretical physicist Lee Smolin in his new book Time Reborn . That means we need to revisit the laws that govern gravity, quantum mechanics, even space itself. "Everything we now think is fundamental will also eventually be understood as approximate and emergent ...
Add two more planets to the small but growing list of candidates that might host intelligent life in the universe. Kepler-62 is a sun-like star some 12,000 light years away in the constellation Lyra. Within the Kepler-62 system are two planets that fall within the so-called "Goldilocks Zone," or ...
What's the Latest Development? Researchers at the University of Illinois say they have come up with a new way of making batteries that could change the way electronics and vehicles are powered. The key is in bringing the two battery electrodes -- the anode and the cathode -- closer together at a ...
How can you think cosmically about global warming? The first thing to do is appreciate how the Earth works, and that the Earth has been through many cycles of being hot and cold. The Earth has been frozen over like a solid snowball several times in the past. It’s been super-hot several times in ...
What's the Latest Development? Drought conditions in the US are worsening to the point where research meteorologist Martin Hoerling compares it to "the blob in the old Steve McQueen movie." Sixty-one percent of the country is experiencing drought, and that number climbs to 79 percent when ...
What's the Latest Development? Florida's rainy season is about to begin, and with it officials are expecting an increase in the number of African giant land snails emerging from hibernation. These mollusks can grow to the size of a rat and can appear to be looking at people, which endears them ...
I’m often asked, "which is the most realistic superhero?" The standard answer would be Batman. But of course, given the number of times that Batman has been knocked unconscious in his 70-year career of crime fighting, he should be permanently brain damaged at this point. And obviously he’s got ...
The British cosmologist Stephen Hawking has had his moments of doubt, about both himself and about the future of the human race. Hawking was diagnosed with ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease, 50 years ago. As a result, he told an audience of doctors at a stem cell laboratory yesterday, Hawking became ...
One very prominent global warming denier is a Dane named Bjorn Lomborg. He wrote a book about ten years ago that got a great deal of attention and he called it The Skeptical Environmentalist . He is an economist and he’s not a scientist. And some people would say economics is not a science, for ...
We do at this point in time need a new Einstein. The one thing that Einstein did, which is so powerful and important in the history of physics is with special relativity he found a way to unify Newton’s laws of motion and Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetism. And then he found a way to unify ...
Throughout my career I’ve been surprised. Perhaps the most amazing surprise to me was actually one that I ultimately proposed but it defied everything I'd thought before. And that is this amazing result that empty space has energy. It is so weird to think that you can get rid of all the ...
Do you believe in free will? Some physicists and neuroscientists believe in the opposite proposition: determinism. The mathematics of quantum mechanics have a say in this argument: Determinism is impossible unless you are willing to make an even greater philosophical sacrifice. A ...
NewSpace is no stranger to challenge, whether above the clouds or in legislation. One particularly ornery obstacle is the US International Traffic and Arms Regulation, commonly known as ITAR. (Please see “Public Policy” in the March 2012 issue of Thruster.) Space technologies are in many cases ...
"Human identity resides in our Brain," Neil deGrasse Tyson tweeted a few months ago, "so the executioner's call 'Off with your head!' should really be 'Off with your body!'" It was a typical tweet by Tyson, who regularly offers acerbic scientific commentary on current events, popular culture and ...
If you're a tennis fan, and a fan of Rafa Nadal in particular, the last seven months probably felt like the period in rock n' roll history in which Elvis was in the Army. The past month, however, has seen Nadal successfully return from a left knee injury, an injury he is still nursing. In fact ...