Big Think

One of the greatest challenges — and perhaps the most important challenge of all — for any theoretical physicist is to connect something you can predictively calculate to something you can go out and measure experimentally or observationally. This is the key not just to testing your current best understanding of reality, but to discovering any anomalies that could pave the way forward to the next revolution in our conception of the Universe. Most of the great revolutions in physics history have

In an environmental ethics class, I had to write a short essay, 800 to maybe 1,000 words, every week. You had to lay out an argument for “why I think eating meat is unacceptable,” or “GMOs are okay, actually.” There was no right answer; what mattered was the quality of your argument. Professor Simeone, who checked a few boxes for crazy, brilliant academics, was a hard grader. If you had lazy arguments or didn’t seriously consider the counterarguments to your position, you were greeted with an en

The birth of the bond market started with a ruthless multinational raid that sent shock waves through the Mediterranean. On the morning of March 12, 1171, the Byzantine emperor’s soldiers suddenly rounded up every Venetian man, woman, and child they could find throughout their lands, seized their shops, wares, and ships, and threw the owners in jail. Over 10,000 people in Constantinople alone were rounded up, and more than 20,000 overall — so many that monasteries were requisitioned to handle th

A special kind of vertigo kicks in when you start clicking the camera icons scattered across the world map at World Watcher Live. Each one drops you into a live feed somewhere on Earth. A street vendor sets up shop off a busy street near the Teatro Amazonas in Manaus, Brazil, the bright orange canopy of his pop-up tent competing for attention with the theatre’s huge golden dome. Blinkers flashing, a truck is making deliveries at a crossroads on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, while a cyclist in

Jennifer Doudna, biochemist and CRISPR co-inventor, walks through the technology’s biggest ethical flashpoints: the 2018 announcement of the first gene-edited babies, the use of gene drives to spread edited traits through wild populations like mosquitoes, and the growing (if overhyped) push to revive extinct species like the dire wolf. Doudna explains why she still feels a personal sense of responsibility for how CRISPR gets used, why the biotech field had a head start on safety compared to AI,

There’s a huge problem with our attempts to uncover the origins of the Universe: we only see our Universe as it is today, 13.8 billion years after the conditions marking the hot Big Bang first came into existence. Sure, we look at objects or events that occurred very far away, and by doing so, we can see the Universe as it was long ago, with the arriving light encoding the conditions that were present when that light was emitted. But because it’s so far away, even with our biggest, most powerful

Cosmically, humanity is a mere drop in the Universe’s vast ocean. This image, taken from the International Space Station by astronaut Karen Nyberg in 2013, shows the two largest islands on the southern part of the Mascarene Plateau: Réunion, in the foreground, and Mauritius, partially covered by clouds. To see a human on Earth from the altitude of the ISS, a telescope the size of Hubble would be needed. The scale of a human is less than 1/5,000,000 the scale of Earth, but Earth is just a prov

If you’re not a member, then probably someone you know or love is: that shrinking, but still substantial guild of book-balancers who build towers of paperbacks on their nightstands.  Few things are as enjoyable as finishing a good book, except perhaps starting a new one, and because the latter is easier than the former, the job is never done. Hence that precipitously perched tower of books.  Being a book-lover is an exercise in mild frustration. You can finish a book, but you can’t finish books.

I have never read Crime and Punishment (1867). I’ve been meaning to for years and thought my moment had come last winter, after a weekend spent researching the best translation for a Dostoevsky newbie. Then life happened, as it does, and the moment skittered on by. I set my brand-new copy on the shelf, and it has been sitting there ever since, spine uncracked, its pristine pages a testament to my lapse. I don’t make this confession in shame. I read many wonderful books last year, some new releas

What’s happening in your brain and body while you’re lost in a great book? Is reading print fundamentally different from reading on a screen? And how can you get the most restorative benefits from your reading habits? We’re covering these questions and much more in Big Think’s upcoming members-only event, Your Brain on Books. Join Big Think director Dan Hayes as he speaks with neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff and writer and book reviewer Alex Wieckowski about the neuroscience behind reading, h

When something falls into a black hole, where does the material ultimately go, and will it, or the quantum information that it contained, ever come back out again? According to Einstein’s general relativity, those answers are simple: as soon as anything physical — matter, antimatter, radiation, etc. — crosses over the event horizon, it’s irretrievably gone. It can add to certain properties, like mass, electric charge, and angular momentum, that the black hole possesses, but little else. Instead,

Tolstoy’s famous opening to Anna Karenina (1878) about happy families being all alike but unhappy ones each being unhappy in their own way applies just as well to feelings. There are simply more ways to feel bad than to feel good — and more words to describe those bad feelings. English is bloated with terms for anger, anxiety, sorrow, shame, jealousy, regret. When it comes to the positive side of the spectrum, the vocabulary thins out fast. Indeed, we lack satisfactory terms for a range of posit

Since it was first proposed way back in the 1930s, scientists have wondered about whether the matter we know of — atoms, their constituents, and other subatomic particles — represent all the matter that exists in the Universe, or whether there’s an unseen form of matter making up the majority of the cosmic mass budget: dark matter. Although the evidence for it has been largely indirect and astrophysical in nature, the cumulative case for dark matter is incredibly strong, coming from many differe

Directly beneath our feet stretches a world both smaller and much, much larger than the one we know. Scientists have just begun mapping what may well be the largest piece of infrastructure on Earth: a network of fungal threads that is 68 quadrillion miles long. It’s alive! And we thought we’d mapped just about everything there is to map on this planet: continents, voting patterns, bird migration routes, alleged apparitions of the Virgin Mary, and Starbucks locations near you. We’ve logged and na

Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen, and Roy Schwartz want you to think deeply about death. Not in a morbid sense, mind you. Rather, imagine you’re writing your own obituary. What do you want it to say? “Thinking about it that way and then working backwards really does create a map [for how to spend your time],” VandeHei told Big Think.  VandeHei would like his obituary to say that he was a great father, son, sibling, and husband who was passionate about the work that he did and generous in the workplace.

It’s a Thursday afternoon, and I’m on a video call with an executive I’ll call Marcus, who is explaining to me, with real precision and a few colorful words, what is wrong with a peer of his I’ll call Dev. Dev was recently quiet in a leadership meeting. Said nothing, nodded along. Then at 11 p.m., Dev sends an email to four people who were in the meeting, laying out every objection he didn’t raise while everyone was in the room. Marcus has been thinking about this for months. His theory: Dev is

To mark the passage of time, we assign 24 hours to each day, universally. Most of us are very used to 24 hours being in a day but aren’t used to the fact that this doesn’t correspond to a 360 degree rotation of the Earth. Most days, however, are either longer or shorter than 24 hours; only 4 days a year have precisely 24 hours to them. Credit: geralt/pixabay While that’s accurate for a day’s average length, most days aren’t 24 hours long. This diagram shows an analemma, constructed by p

The success of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey (2026) has motivated many moviegoers to pick up their own copy of the ancient poem. But while Homer’s take on the tale of Odysseus is one of the most famous classical texts to have survived into modern times, it’s hardly the only one worth reading. And for those looking to dive deeper into Greek myth, it may not even be the best place to start.  We wanted to put together a beginner’s guide to Greek mythology and literature, but to do it right, we ne

In our Universe, the mathematical forms that the laws of physics take on give us all of the possibilities for what’s allowed to conceivably exist. However, only by actually observing, measuring, and experimenting with our Universe itself can we determine which of the mathematical possibilities describes our physical reality. In Einstein’s general relativity, one of the very first theoretical solutions that was ever uncovered was the solution for a black hole: a region of space with so much matte

Most leadership development programs fail quietly. Designed to look great on paper, rarely built to change behavior in practice. Jessica Lane, Director of Enablement and Communications at ScentAir, knows this better than most. She’s built something that works with a “small but mighty” L&D team, a limited budget, and a CEO who’s completely bought-in. This is what she learned about building a leadership development program that actually works. Why most programs fail before they start The failure u