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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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 ...
Early in the morning on February 15 a 55-foot meteor entered Earth's atmosphere undetected. The resulting explosion -- estimated to have the strength of 25 Hiroshimas -- woke a lot of people up. That is to say, the meteor created a shock wave that injured 1,200 people in the Chelyabinsk region ...
Imagine a continuum of an industry’s present and potential customers, ordered by expected revenue per customer. Costs determine the extent the industry can meet the demand, and, in turn the revenue from this market continuum. Nascent industries like NewSpace possess high costs that may limit ...
Imagine you're at a black-tie gala. It's super fancy. Waiters slip through the chattering throng carrying collages of crackers, caviar, and cheese. Others bear trays arranged with glasses of expensive champagne. Everybody important is there: friends, colleagues, influential media persons ...
This post, by Tom Hartsfield, was originally published in RealClear Science's Newton blog. You can read the original here. Back in 8th grade, I hated math. Everyone hated math. Maybe the kid who kept their calculator (or slide rule, for you vintage readers) in a case didn't hate math. That kid ...
The fear of death. That's how a friend of mine who works in television described the essential ingredient of hit reality shows like Ice Road Truckers. That's why people watch. Viewers of NASA Television can get a similar thrill when they tune into a half-hour broadcast LIVE from NASA's Jet ...
On February 15th, the people of planet Earth will receive a wake-up call from our Solar System. Asteroid 2012 DA14, discovered just 1 year ago, will narrowly miss hitting the Earth by only 17 thousand miles. That is about the distance the Earth travels in just 15 minutes, so this truly is a close ...
Snapshot: In the video below, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson argues that we need to break out of our "A-to-B thinking" in order to bring big, audacious ideas into existence. *** In an effort to foster transparency and participation, the White House launched its We the People petition ...