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.
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Physicist, Author: A Universe from Nothing
When you combine quantum mechanics and relativity, it tells us that for every particle that exists in nature, it turns out there is a possibility, in fact, a likelihood, that out of empty space, particle/anti-particle pairs will be created spontaneously and they’ll exist for a little while and then ...
I've tried to write about the remarkable discoveries in science over the last 40 years because I think that's really what motivated me. I want to communicate these amazing revelations about the universe. And it is true that I argued that they suggest the universe could come from nothing without ...
One of the reasons it’s so difficult to make a quantum computer, and one of the reasons I'm a little skeptical at the moment, is the reason the quantum world seems so strange to us is that we don’t behave quantum mechanically. You could run toward a wall from now until the end of the universe and ...
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 ...