Very few of my friends understand the basic probabilities of life. They just see things in black and white, and almost always from hunches. Can you tell me why a lot of humans are so bad at probability, and why it’s important to be better? – Pratyush, India I used to work with so … | Continue reading
As modern humans we experience a different world and experience than anyone who has ever come before us. This is because we’ve inverted the dynamics of how our lives unfold. We live on a planet defined by local stability, but global instability. The hunter-gatherers that came bef … | Continue reading
If you examine the Universe extremely closely, by probing the fundamental entities with it on the smallest possible scales, you’ll discover that reality is fundamentally quantum in nature. Matter itself is made up of indivisible, uncuttable quantum entities: particles like quarks … | Continue reading
A duo of economists recently surveyed where 6,141 members of the world’s global elite went to college. The results show that a select few academic institutions graduate the most powerful and influential people. Ricardo J. Salas Diaz is a lecturer at Dartmouth and Kevin Young is a … | Continue reading
Coming into the holidays, I wanted to take a beat and reflect back on the last several months. So I wrote down 10 lessons I learned this year. Perhaps some of these will resonate with you, too. The year was a big one, both personally—and professionally. We launched an ETF in June … | Continue reading
Each one of us — in a very physical and physiological way — is 13.8 billion years old. This is the age of the Universe. It took our cosmos this long to forge the elements and build up the cumulative complexity that makes us what we are. It took the Universe 13.8 billion years to … | Continue reading
It likely wasn’t long after the first utterances of our ancestors that misinformation was born. It may have been an honest misunderstanding. It may have been a dubious actor trying to get one up on his fellow tribe members. Whatever the case, half-truths and alternative facts are … | Continue reading
I use the internet a lot. I used it to research this article, to get this job, and to check my social media on company time. I use GPS to check the traffic, and I use Google to ask things I’m too old to ask: What’s the best way to cook rice? How do you paint a wall? What does thi … | Continue reading
In a year where science stories seemed to be dominated by rocket launches, hype surrounding artificial intelligence and quantum computing, and how political meddling threatens the enterprise of science itself, it might seem like basic science is stagnating. But that’s not true at … | Continue reading
Country-level corruption is a tough KPI to quantify. So how do organizations like Transparency International and the World Bank do it? Not by comparing the fiscal, economic, and financial data of each country — they’d only end up comparing (rotten) apples to (spoiled) oranges. In … | Continue reading
It’s like he died—except if somebody dies, they’re not going to show up at your doorstep one day.” That’s how Lynn describes what it felt like when her ex—let’s call him Aidan—abruptly cut off all contact last year. The two had been dating for seven years, and shared a home in su … | Continue reading
Picture yourself on a train hurtling toward Nara Prefecture, hours away from the neon-lit frenzy of Tokyo. The urban sprawl gives way to quieter vistas, the journey itself a pilgrimage of sorts. By the time you arrive in Ikaruga, at Hōryū-ji — widely considered one of the world’s … | Continue reading
It’s rare that a book comes along that changes the way experts in their field think about the fundamentals, while simultaneously being accessible and informative to those without expert knowledge themselves. That’s why, as 2024 winds down, it’s a no-brainer selection to choose Ma … | Continue reading
There are two ways to write a bestseller. The first is to imagine something truly original. You need to invent a world or coin a new idea — an idea that changes the reader. The second way is to rewrite and refresh something. You put Shakespeare in an American high school or give … | Continue reading
Many challenges in the world today are the result of failed leadership. A leadership style that thrives on hierarchy and rewards competition; a leadership that is built around the egos of those who lead and not around their capacity to lead positive change. We can no longer affor … | Continue reading
How did our Universe become the way it is today? A portion of the dwarf galaxy Wolf–Lundmark–Melotte (WLM) captured by the James Webb Space Telescope’s Near-Infrared Camera. This region showcases some of the stars located within WLM, some ~3 million light-years away, along with m … | Continue reading
This article is an installment of Future Explored, Freethink’s weekly guide to world-changing technology. You can get stories like this one straight to your inbox every Saturday morning by subscribing above. It’s 2028, and for the first time in living memory, the US obesity rate … | Continue reading
While I was studying toward ordination as secular humanist clergy two decades ago, I had the fortune of meeting the late rabbi Sherwin Wine, a brilliant philosopher whom TIME magazine profiled as “the atheist rabbi” in 1967. He became my favorite teacher and mentor as I trained t … | Continue reading
California, August 2048. Much of the state has been baking in a severe heat wave going on for two weeks, with temperatures consistently reaching 100°F. The air is dry; the ground is parched; the flora is kindling. In this tinderbox, suddenly there’s a spark… Within 15 minutes, th … | Continue reading
What are you? According to science, you are a collection of material particles, a complex machine, completely devoid of any inherent meaning. According to certain religions, you are a divine, conscious soul with the capacity to feel and love, imbued with meaning and cosmic signif … | Continue reading
I had a conversation with my six-year-old daughter about the reality of a rainbow when she asked why we can’t touch it. I explained it’s water and light making an illusion, but then she asked if it’s real. I said yes, but not in the way we can touch and feel. Then she asked if th … | Continue reading
Humans have been chasing happiness for thousands of years. But we can’t seem to agree on the exact definition of happiness and it’s often presented as simply a smiling face on social media. Jonny Thomson, author and our very own staff writer here at Big Think, argues that happine … | Continue reading
Work can often be stressful. It can be exhausting. And so, when you jam exhausted and stressed people into a room or with a three-day deadline, you can pretty much expect there’s going to be some kind of carnage. People will snap and bite. They’ll hiss and sneer. There will be bl … | Continue reading
Quantum computation is, simultaneously, a remarkable scientific achievement with the potential to solve an array of problems that currently are wholly impractical to solve, and also a breathless source of wild, untrue claims that completely defy reality. In 2021, there were claim … | Continue reading
Imagine receiving a distressed call from your grandson; his voice filled with fear as he describes a horrible car accident. That’s what happened to Jane, a 75-year-old senior citizen of Regina, Canada. Pressed by urgency, she was at the bank in a few hours, collecting bail money … | Continue reading
For a substantial part of human history, people thought smoking tobacco was perfectly healthy. Native American tribes, who introduced the tobacco plant to Europeans and — by extension, the rest of the world — used it for cultural and spiritual purposes, giving little thought to i … | Continue reading
This week, Google announced that its new state-of-the-art quantum chip, Willow, could perform a computation in under five minutes that would otherwise take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10 septillion years to solve. (For the record: that’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,0 … | Continue reading
Not only in the United States, but all across the world, humanity celebrated 2024 as the 55th anniversary of the culmination of the Space Race: the quest to put a human being on the Moon and safely return them to Earth. On July 20, 1969, our species achieved a dream older than ci … | Continue reading
Chapter 4, Section 2: The Life Well-Lived “In America we have created a new race,” wrote Lewis Mumford in 1940, “with healthy physiques, sometimes beautiful bodies, but empty minds—people who have accepted life as an alternation of meaningless routine with insignificant sensation … | Continue reading
My new guilty pleasure is the video game “Star Wars Outlaws” (guilty only because so many gamers seemed to hate it — they are wrong). Like all “Star Wars” stories, it’s set in a galaxy far, far away that hosts a vast interstellar civilization. And, like all civilizations, it’s a … | Continue reading
When Daniel Goleman released his best-selling book “Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ,” the concept resonated with millions of readers, many experiencing an “aha” moment, recognizing this trait in people that they admired. Through his research, Goleman found … | Continue reading
Here on planet Earth, as well as in most locations in the Universe, everything we observe and interact with is made up of atoms. Atoms come in roughly 90 different naturally occurring species, where all atoms of the same species share similar physical and chemical properties, but … | Continue reading
The term “Overhuman” (Übermensch) made its public debut in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra in 1883. Far from being a tidy philosophical theory, this cryptic concept was more of a lightning bolt — a vision that struck Nietzsche with overwhelming force. He tells us how … | Continue reading
It’s easy to accept that human disorders such as phenylketonuria or cystic fibrosis or Huntington’s disease have a wholly genetic basis. And you likely have no problem believing that your risk of being afflicted with an illness such as heart disease, diabetes, or colon cancer is … | Continue reading
If our age is defined by stagnation and stasis, which results from a generalized form of risk intolerance that permeates all of society, how can we break free and reach escape velocity for accelerated technological and scientific progress? In a word: bubbles. This might seem coun … | Continue reading
Try, if you dare, to imagine what the Universe was like right at the start of the hot Big Bang. Everywhere, all at once, space was populated by a primordial bath of quanta: particles, antiparticles, photons, gluons, and more, including anything and everything whose existence is p … | Continue reading
In 1966, renowned American engineer A. Michael Noll designed a computer program capable of creating semi-random geometric compositions in the style of Dutch artist Piet Mondrian, known for such abstract paintings as Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow and Broadway Boogie-Woogie … | Continue reading
What does it take to build a healthcare system that truly supports an aging population? Michael Dowling, CEO of Northwell Health, addresses the growing need to rethink how we care for seniors in America as over 62 million people are now over 65. Healthcare is evolving to focus on … | Continue reading
Compared to our Solar System, galaxies simply outclass us. A logarithmic chart of distances, showing the planets, the Voyager spacecraft, the Oort Cloud, and our nearest star: Proxima Centauri. The Sun may be 109 times the diameter of Earth, but the Earth-Sun distance is over 100 … | Continue reading
The most memorable image of ignorance occurs in what is probably the most famous passage of all philosophy: Plato’s Allegory of the Cave in “The Republic.” Recall the scenario: human beings dwelling in the darkness of an underground cavern, bound at the legs and neck so that they … | Continue reading
At a 1959 meeting of the American Physical Society at Caltech, physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman gave a talk titled “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” which opened with a simple question: “Why can’t we write the entire 24 volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica on … | Continue reading
When we look out at our home galaxy, the Milky Way, we have to recognize that even though it’s been growing and evolving for 13.8 billion years, we’re only observing it as it is right now: a snapshot in time determined by the light that’s arriving in our instruments right now. Ho … | Continue reading
There is a popular theory that the internet is “dead.” The claim is that the vast majority of the internet’s content and traffic is now generated by artificial intelligence and bots, talking aimlessly to each other, rendering the online world effectively lifeless – devoid of huma … | Continue reading
Almost everyone I meet tells me that beauty is subjective. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But does that mean there are no good and bad movies? Does that mean that Shawshank Redemption is no better than Sausage Party? – Kiara, USA This is a great question because I think we … | Continue reading
We all have ideas about how we’re gonna behave in a crisis or emergency, but it’s almost never how it actually plays out when we’re faced with a disaster situation, says bestselling author Amanda Ripley. In fact, you have another personality – a ‘disaster personality’ –, and it’s … | Continue reading
When black holes were first derived within the context of general relativity, it was thought to be an absolute, irrevocable end-state of a completely collapsed object. Aside from possessing mass, electric charge, and angular momentum, no other properties would matter, and so long … | Continue reading
A few years ago, I argued that the U.S. is in desperate need of a National Data Service. As I wrote then, the Founding Fathers could not have foreseen the fragility of our national public measurement system, even if they did know that collecting data to determine representation w … | Continue reading
In a recent episode of Talking Billions, Chris Mayer, author of 100 Baggers and co-founder of Woodlock House Family Capital, sat down with host Bogumil Baranowski to delve into the art of long-term investing. The highlight? A fascinating discussion on the paradox of embracing unc … | Continue reading