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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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Experimental Philosopher
The universe is quantum. Physicists have known that for decades. Yet the economy remains as Newtonian today as when Sir Isaac Newton was the Master of the Royal Mint at the beginning of the 18th century. The time has come for a new and improved quantum economics: An economic system that is ...
Abstract Expressionism is now over half a century old, and in all those years nobody has bothered to improve upon the antiquated techniques of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. If you want to express your emotions, the expectation is that you spill or spread colorful pigments onto a swathe of canvas ...
I think that human beings are most limited in their tendency to pursue certainty and to think that answers are somehow absolute or even beneficial. The degree to which we can go about the process of living as humans in increasingly interesting ways, in increasingly productive ways, is one in which ...
I don’t know that I have any ideas. I have notions maybe. I have curiosity. I have a deep appreciation for serendipity. I have a way of living my life, listening in on things, reading eclectically and as a dilettante irresponsibly and piecing it all together in ways that are really not meant ...
In the first few months of 1963, the Mona Lisa was seen by nearly two million people in New York and Washington DC. Shipped to the United States on a diplomatic mission – escorted by the French culture minister and received by President John F. Kennedy – the painting did little to assuage Franco ...