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As anyone who knows me is aware, I’m generally a peaceful and diplomatic fellow. I’m not one to pick fights just for the hell of it. But that said, I’m […]

Interview with Jason Silva by Frank Rose One afternoon recently I spent a couple of hours with Jason Silva, the longtime Current TV host who’s been making much-talked-about micro-videos about the […]

Instead of landing a craft on a comet, scientists want to study space rocks by firing a harpoon at them. The harpoon's tip will collect rock samples and return them to Earth for study.

From all of us here at Big Think, Happy 70th birthday, Stephen! If you had only been one of the smartest humans ever, it would have been enough – but you're something much bigger than that: a model of how to live.

Some say our sense that life means something is an illusion, or that it would be an illusion if there were no god. Some say free-will is an illusion. These […]

Tonight, I’m happy to announce that I’ll be speaking to the Secular Student Alliance at Syracuse University on December 9, one week from tomorrow. The talk will be about ethics […]

Like their namesakes from fable who live under bridges, “Trolls” are people who write nasty remarks and live underneath an online article, in its Comments section.  Media mavens and content […]

The world's largest array of radio telescopes may soon be awarded to South Africa. Besides revolutionizing our knowledge of the cosmos, the project could spark a scientific renaissance.

Following up on her first book, renowned physicist Lisa Randall's newest work explores the cosmos, from the atoms being smashed at the L.H.C. to physicists' search for dark matter. 

A new theory suggests that the accelerating expansion of the universe is merely an illusion. The false impression results from the way our particular region of the cosmos is drifting in space.

A new book argues "we and our children may be the most significant generations of humans that have yet lived," which means we carry a far greater burden of responsibility than any previous generation.

In each generation, our most brilliant thinkers lay the foundations on which lesser lights will build a new, bloated bureaucracy of the mind. Can experimental philosopher Jonathon Keats help us break the cycle? 

So the Big Think’s AGE OF ENGAGEMENT is advertising a showing of Carl Sagan’s hugely influential film CONTACT.  The film will be shown, appropriately enough, as an excellent example of how […]

Several mysteries currently bedevil physicists such as our inability to account for an expanding universe and an apparent exception to the cosmological principle of uniform laws.

For almost 2000 years, Western Art has groped about in the darkness, laboring under the Ptolemaic misconception that Earth (and humankind) is at the center of all things. Until now.

“A second-class intellect but a first-class temperament” was Oliver Wendell Holmes’ assessment of Franklin Roosevelt, reflecting an old and widespread notion that the smartest and most ingenious person in the […]

For many Americans a “moment of Zen” is the segment that ends every episode of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Those brief glimpses of contemporary life usually reprise an […]

Here you can read the reaction of “the intelligent design community” to a recent article of mine.  This post, of course, is double-down shameless self-promotion, because it includes both praise of […]

Scientists say our galaxy would have burned out long ago if it depended exclusively on its own resources to generate new stars. So what keeps the lights on across the universe?

All fiction has, at its heart, the enigma of character. What happens if science co-opts this question?

I finally found one word to describe Memory as Medicine, the Radcliffe Bailey exhibition I saw last Saturday – colossal. More than mere paint on canvas, the huge multimedia selections […]

In the last fifty years, a remarkable sea change has taken place in the field of astronomy: Life, once considered unfathomably rare, is now thought likely to exist elsewhere. 

Carl Sagan describes the so-called “Drake Equation,” named after Frank Drake of Cornell, in the program Cosmos, episode 12 “The Encyclopaedia Galactica.” The Drake Equation is used to calculate the […]

1. So my post on NASA provoked a variety of most thoughtful responses.  The ones by Brendan were the most detailed and philosophic, but they were all worthwhile.  2. Their […]

At the end of War and Peace Tolstoy compares belief in free will to medieval cosmologies where the Sun revolved around the Earth. To know the true cosmos, he writes, […]

While satellites and infrastructure crumble, we are also witnessing an explosion in space tourism that is exposing the gap between the Haves and Have-Nots in space.

BY JASON SILVA “Limited in his nature, infinite in his desire, man is a fallen god who remembers heaven.”   –Alphonse de Lamartine, French romantic poet. PART I: DREAMING WITH […]

One of the most disappointing moments in an otherwise fairly encouraging Republican New Hampshire debate was that none of the seven candidates would continue federal funding for human space flight.  […]

Astronomers have been actively searching for extraterrestrial civilizations for the past 50 years, but so far have come up empty. Now a top Russian astronomer predicts the "eerie silence" will be broken by 2031.  

Stephen Hawking recently said that the afterlife is a fairy tale for people "afraid of the dark". He compares the mind to a computer—once its component parts stop, the whole operation ceases.