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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RealClearScience Contributor
This article originally appeared in the Newton blog on RealClearScience. You can read the original here. The courtroom is hushed. A teenage boy has been slain, riddled with bullets during a drive-by shooting, and there, on the witness stand, is his crying mother. She's understandably weeping ...
This post originally appeared on the Newton blog on RealClearScience. Read the original here. Venus has always captured the attention of humanity. Of all the objects that adorn our night sky, it's the brightest, excluding the Moon. Peering through his telescope in the early 17th century ...
This article originally appeared in the Newton blog at RealClearScience. You can read the original here. In the opening scenes of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan , two Starfleet officers find themselves in quite a perilous situation. Captured by a group of renegades bent on revenge against ...
This article originally appeared in ReaClearScience's Newton Blog. You can read the original here. It's amusing and intellectually stimulating to seriously ponder the existence and characteristics of alien life. But like quantum mechanics, such contemplations can easily wrack the mind, leaving ...
This post originally appeared in RealClearScience's Newton blog. You can read the original here. Ah, sleep: life's natural, blessed repose from the ardors of arousal. As a physiological necessity, we desire and crave it. Yet for so many Americans, sleep's caressing graces are unattainable ...