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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Big Think’s contributors offer expert analysis of the big ideas behind the news.
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Congratulations to Drs. S. Haroche and D. Wineland for winning the Nobel Prize in Physics. (It may be too early for Peter Higgs to win the Nobel Prize for the Higgs boson. Maybe next year). These two physicists got the Prize for doing experiments once thought to be impossible, i.e. studying ...
Han Solo’s Millennium Falcon is a real spaceship. Han can take off at a moment’s notice and escape from pursuers into space. And when he reaches his destination he simply flies right down through the planet’s atmosphere and can land on almost any patch of ground. After a quick refueling he can do ...
Every week, Dr. Michio Kaku will be answering reader questions about physics and futuristic science. If you have a question for Dr. Kaku, just post it in the comments section below and check back on Wednesdays to see if he answers it. This week Dr. Kaku addresses the question of Collective ...
50 years ago today, President John F. Kennedy delivered his famous speech at Rice University challenging America to send a man to the moon within a decade. If Kennedy were alive today, he would probably be amazed at the audacity of a new project that is light years more ambitious: DARPA's 100-Year ...
What's the Big Idea? "Hacking the physical" is how Dale Dougherty described the burgeoning DIY Drone movement to Peter Daimandis in his book Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think . Dougherty, the founder and publisher of Make magazine, was describing the broad trend that has enabled ...
Every week, Dr. Michio Kaku will be answering reader questions about physics and futuristic science. If you have a question for Dr. Kaku, just post it in the comments section below and check back on Wednesdays to see if he answers it. Today, Dr. Kaku addresses the question of what comes next ...
A dollar doesn’t equal a dollar; a rover doesn’t equal a rover. What does that mean? Well, let’s just put it this way: While NASA has done an exceptional job of placing a rover on the fourth rock from the sun, I, for one, cannot be muzzled any longer. Most people celebrate the technological ...
What is the meaning of infinity? How can the Higgs boson be explained in a way that is clear and accessible? The answers to these questions and many others can be found in five videos that theoretical physicist Dr. Michio Kaku says you cannot afford to miss. This list also includes Dr. Kaku's ...
Every Wednesday, Michio Kaku will be answering reader questions about physics and futuristic science. If you have a question for Dr. Kaku, just post it in the comments section below and check back on Wednesdays to see if he answers it. Today, Dr. Kaku addresses the question of where should NASA ...
It has been a milestone week for NASA, thanks to the successful landing of the Mars Curiosity Rover using a novel system. All the good publicity has helped feed the sentiment that NASA needs more money to do things like this more often. In fact, a campaign to fund NASA through Kickstarter has gone ...
NASA went for the Gold with the Curiosity space probe, and scored a perfect 10. Perfect start, perfect execution, perfect dismount. And Curiosity is the Godzilla of space probes, with 10 times the instruments of any previous Mars probe, weighing 5 times more as well. This is truly a ...
Here's an interesting engineering challenge. Fly an unmanned spacecraft carrying a 2,000 pound rover 300 million miles to Mars. Smash into the planet's extremely thin atmosphere at 13,000 mph, which will light up the craft's heat shield like the sun, reaching temperatures of 1,600 degrees. The ...
The discovery of the Higgs boson was a real milestone for physics, a tremendous vindication of the hard work of thousands of physicists and engineers for the past 30 years. But this is just the beginning. The recent Higgs boson is just the first of a series of new forms of matter and energy. The ...
There is plenty that we still don't know about hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a method that has been used to greatly increase natural gas production in the U.S. and around the world. Here's what we do know. Fracking involves pumping a mixture of water, sand and chemicals deep into underground ...
There's something happening and you don't know what it is: PhD physicists from elite programs dabbling in the occult. These physicists, described in David Kaiser's new book How the Hippies Saved Physics , would seem to fit right in with the other zany characters who inhabit Bob Dylan's song, "Ballad ...