There is a rich and long history to the philosophy of reading. In his Phaedrus, Plato attacked reading as corrupting true philosophical dialectic. Later, in his 1597 book Essays, Francis Bacon wrote that “Reading maketh a full man.” And, in more modern times, Maryanne Wolf has sa … | Continue reading
Ever since the final years of the original space race, NASA has been unrivaled as the world leader in space sciences and space exploration. In particular, NASA astrophysics has brought us a wide range of space telescopes that have pushed the frontiers of humanity’s knowledge acro … | Continue reading
From a scientific perspective, studying consciousness is a bit like trying to describe the singularity inside a black hole from the window of a spacecraft in its gravitational orbit. We can see how the black hole warps and contorts the space around it: Superheated dust and gas sp … | Continue reading
Partway through our conversation about his new book Good Writing: How to Improve Your Sentences, Neal Allen lost his train of thought. He turned toward his wife and co-author, Anne Lamott. The two riffed briefly, their faces slightly angled away from their computer and from me. “ … | Continue reading
Jim Al-Khalili introduces the technologies emerging from the second quantum revolution: computers that exploit superposition to solve problems that would take today’s best supercomputers billions of years, sensors that read individual neurons firing inside your skull, and cameras … | Continue reading
There are, in general, two ways in which scientific advancement occurs. There’s the slow, incremental change that represents most scientific advances: where the existing scientific foundation gets built upon in a small but meaningful way. Typically, we perform experiments or obse … | Continue reading
Gretchen Rubin is a genuine multi-hyphenate. She began her career as a clerk in the Supreme Court and switched to writing when she had an idea for a book, Power Money Fame Sex: A User’s Guide, which was published in 2000. Bestselling books on happiness, habit-making and breaking, … | Continue reading
American culture demands that pain be productive. Historian Kate Bowler explores how the obsession with finding meaning in suffering turns into what she calls “purpose monsters”: the need to make every loss, failure, or tragedy count for something. But not everything happens for … | Continue reading
Whenever stars are born, their masses determines their fates. The (modern) Morgan–Keenan spectral classification system, with the surface temperature range of each star class shown above it, in kelvin. The overwhelming majority of stars today are M-class stars, with only 1 kno … | Continue reading
When most of us were children, and we went to a rural area with clear skies overhead at night, we were all greeted by the same familiar sight: a dark night sky, glittering with many hundreds or even thousands of stars. Depending on how dark your sky was, you could spot up to 6000 … | Continue reading
H. Ross Perot, former presidential candidate and founder of multinational IT company Electronic Data Systems (EDS), once said, “Talk is cheap. Words are plentiful. Deeds are precious.” He’s right. Deeds are what make intelligence powerful. Intelligence without action is philoso … | Continue reading
Here on Earth, signal degradation is a real problem whenever we transmit information to one another. Signals like sound, light, and gravity spread out through space in three dimensions, becoming weaker and weaker as you travel farther from the source. The medium that the signal t … | Continue reading
Time feels obvious, but physics tells a stranger story about its existence: Theoretical physicist Jim Al-Khalili explores why our sense of time may be incredibly misleading, including the idea that past, present, and future might all exist at once. This video The block universe: … | Continue reading
It is March 27, 1933. Here is a headline in the New York Times: “Hitler Is Supreme Under Enabling Act.” Under that headline: “Chancellor, Preeminent Over Cabinet, Is Now Practically the German Government.” A few lines later, under that: “All Legislative Powers Have Been Transferr … | Continue reading
Anytime you reach deeper into the unknown than ever before, you should not only wonder about what you’re going to find, but also worry about what sort of demons you might accidentally unearth. In nuclear physics, discovering the internal structure of the atom led to enormous adva … | Continue reading
In the opening chapter of his book, Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche argues that philosophers have always had a strange, pathological obsession with “truth.” Truth is seen as the greatest good in the universe, and, if we believe Socrates, all the bad and evil in the worl … | Continue reading
When I first started working in venture capital, I was given a seemingly straightforward assignment: Get to know the most successful founders we’d invested in and figure out what they had in common. Ideally, I’d emerge with a neat checklist of experiences and attributes my firm c … | Continue reading
What if humanity is the galaxy’s only advanced civilization? Brian Cox examines why, despite billions of stars and trillions of planets, we have found no evidence of other intelligent life. This video Why alien civilizations may bloom and die unseen is featured on Big Think. | Continue reading
One of the great mysteries in the Universe is that, in all the vastness of space, we have yet to detect any sort of life out there beyond our own planet. Whether microbial and simple, multicellular and complex, highly differentiated and intelligent, or technologically advanced, t … | Continue reading
“There is nothing in the world more powerful than a good story,” Tyrion Lannister, played by Peter Dinklage, declares in the infamously lackluster finale of Game of Thrones. It sounds cliché, but in Westeros, it’s true. The books the TV show is based on are called A Song of Ice … | Continue reading
Most of us think we can spot a psychopath from a mile away, but we likely already have, and didn’t even know it. Far from the cartoonishly evil perception that most of us have, psychopathy is more about emotional deficits hidden behind a veneer of normalcy. Abigail Marsh unpacks … | Continue reading
One of the most puzzling facets of our Universe is the apparent need for a new form of mass in our cosmos that isn’t made up of any of the particles we know of: dark matter. Whereas we’re fully aware of the full suite of Standard Model particles — quarks, charged leptons, neutrin … | Continue reading
MIT researcher Sharon Gilad-Gutnick has witnessed many children see for the first time. After having their cataracts surgically removed, the children can see the world but don’t recognize faces well. Even among those who can recognize the faces of their parents or others they kno … | Continue reading
In the middle of the 20th century, the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle coined one of the most influential phrases in modern thought: “the ghost in the machine.” He was challenging Cartesian dualism, the idea that the human mind is an invisible pilot steering the body from somewh … | Continue reading
Astrophysicist Sara Seager has spent decades expanding how we search for life beyond Earth: not by asking what we would look like out there, but by imagining forms of intelligence that may be utterly unlike our own. Her work explores “technosignatures” — physical clues of advance … | Continue reading
Our Sun gravitationally dominates the Solar System. Here in our own Solar System, the Sun dominates the spacetime within it in nearly all locations. Whereas the environment close to a planet is locally dominated by that planet’s gravity, and the ensuing curvature it imprints o … | Continue reading
Here in our Universe, there’s a big puzzle at the heart of every black hole. According to Einstein’s General Relativity, for every black hole that exists within the Universe, there are only three properties that go into it that matter in any way: the black hole’s total mass, the … | Continue reading
We tend to imagine ancient life in broad strokes. But daily existence was built out of small, sensory details. The taste of staple foods, the smell of living spaces, the feel of handmade tools in your hands — those experiences shaped the people of the past. Sam Kean examines how … | Continue reading
Sven Nyholm already sees troubling signs among his students. As a Professor of Ethics of Artificial Intelligence at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, he’s noticed that many can’t be bothered to engage with demanding texts when an AI summary is just seconds away. “AI is desi … | Continue reading
[In the] summer of 2008, Sue and I kept up the charade of normal life by hunting for a house. We told ourselves it was optimism. In reality, it was desperation disguised as hope; some fragile belief that this whole FBI informant nightmare had an expiration date. Sue’s dad, Bob, t … | Continue reading
Here on Earth, the very idea of a laser is relatively novel, having only been invented in 1958. The underlying physics is straightforward: an electron within a molecule gets excited to a higher-energy state, the electron de-transitions back to the lower energy state, where it em … | Continue reading
European folktales often center around three colors: red, black, and white. Snow White has skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood, and hair as black as ebony. In the Grimms’ “Iron Hans,” a young man rides three horses into three battles — a red horse, a black horse, and a wh … | Continue reading
A woman stands at the edge of the Amazon Rainforest. Behind her, an explosion of life — thousands of animal species, billions of trees, lush canopy. Ahead, another kind: Humanity. People from every corner of the Earth fill the city of Belém, Brazil. It’s a sea of color, music, a … | Continue reading
It’s called the Gladiator Strategy. The Swiss CEO of a shoe company stirred his espresso as he tried to convince me of his preferred way of working: “I think a battle of ideas is so important. It helps us fight things out, so the one idea left standing is the absolute best idea. … | Continue reading
Sometimes, when Jim Belushi feels anxious, he tells himself he’s actually just stoked. “Physiologically,” the actor, comedian, and entrepreneur tells Big Think, “what happens to your body when you’re nervous or fearful is exactly the same thing as what happens when you’re excited … | Continue reading
Here on Earth, it seems easy and straight forward to know “where” anything is, or to know “when” an event either occurred or will occur. After all, we’ve mapped out the entire surface of the Earth, and can define our location with three coordinates — latitude, longitude, and alti … | Continue reading
I read Mark Lynas’s book Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet when I was 14 years old, and it scared the life out of me. Lynas takes the reader on a journey of what to expect from a world that’s one degree warmer, two degrees, three degrees, all the way up to six degrees. B … | Continue reading
On a rough day, it’s rarely the workload that breaks you. It’s the human layer: the meeting that turns tense, the work chat message you read as disrespect, the impulse to fire off a reply that feels righteous for thirty seconds and costly for a week. In those moments, emotional i … | Continue reading
For most of human history, love was not a choice we made, love was a choice made for us. By our family, our class, or by means of survival. Now that love has been liberated, it seems to have become more complicated and more illusive than ever. Alain de Botton explains. This vid … | Continue reading
However you feel about artificial intelligence (AI) — and, in particular, about the large language models and chatbots that are powered by it — the reality is that humanity is currently building and expanding infrastructure to support it. This includes large networks of power-dem … | Continue reading
Toxic positivity has become a cultural system in America, says historian and professor Kate Bowler. She traces how optimism became an emotional mandate in American life: a belief that bright sides and silver linings can solve anything. But when positivity refuses pain, it stops b … | Continue reading
What, exactly, composes the Universe? In order for life to emerge within the Universe, the chemical precursor ingredients need to be delivered to an environment where life can arise, sustain itself, and thrive. This cannot happen until the elements required for life, including … | Continue reading
An unfortunate side effect of reading philosopher C. Thi Nguyen’s latest book, The Score, is noticing how much sway metrics hold over you. I say “unfortunate” not because the realization is unwelcome, quite the opposite, but because you’ll find yourself taking account of the nume … | Continue reading
If we’re willing to think about the future, the farther ahead we extrapolate, the farther along the inevitable path towards our thermodynamic end state: the heat death of the Universe. Star-formation will eventually end, and then the last shining stars will burn out. Galaxies wil … | Continue reading
We want to believe that love is guided by instinct, and that following our heart will lead us to our ideal soulmate. Alain de Botton argues that our romantic lives are shaped more by the emotional patterns we learned in childhood than by destiny. This video Why healthy love feels … | Continue reading
In Andy Weir’s bestselling novel The Martian, foul-mouthed protagonist Mark Watney “sciences the shit” out of his circumstances to survive being stranded on Mars. The result is an engrossing work of science fiction, particularly captivating for its apparent realism. Watney ekes o … | Continue reading
The idea of the Big Bang has captivated the imagination of humanity since it was first proposed nearly a full 100 years ago. Since the Universe is expanding today (as observations have indicated since the 1920s), then we can extrapolate back, earlier and earlier, to when it was s … | Continue reading
In this monthly issue, we explore the bleeding edge of biotech, as well as the scientists, writers, and philosophers whose efforts helped get us here. | Continue reading