Big Think

Philosopher Joe Folley is skeptical that there’s a core self down there to find.

It’s hard to believe, but the idea that the Universe was dominated not by normal matter but rather by dark matter — a novel form of non-interacting matter that’s completely distinct from protons, neutrons, and electrons — goes all the way back to 1933: ne…

Why do you think anything is normal?

In the deserts of fourth-century Egypt, monks described a strange affliction: a restless urge to be anywhere but where they were, attending to any reality but the one in front of them.

In this Universe, just because you can see it doesn’t mean you can reach it.

Air, land, and sea.

Drawing on psychiatrist Murray Bowen’s family systems theory, Henri Tajfel’s minimal group experiments, and Gustave Le Bon’s study of crowds, Luke Burgis separates the “solid self” from the “pseudo self” that reshapes itself for every room, and how to pre…

Neuropsychiatrist Iain McGilchrist turns to one of philosophy’s oldest questions: what is consciousness, and where does it come from?

Here in our Universe, there are a series of fundamental forces that all appear to operate independently of one another.

Is a “red” rose really red?

Here on Earth, we constantly experience Earth’s gravity: 1g, or 9.8 m/s².

When the general public speaks about dark matter, most of the discussion centers on the topic of whether dark matter exists or not: on whether it’s real.

At the time of this writing, there is no consensus about how COVID started.

Out there in the Universe, there are some incredibly impressive astrophysical entities, including behemoths that dwarf anything we’re familiar with.

Narcissistic people are often charming at the dinner party and cruel in the car ride home, which tells you they can control it.

By the end of the 20th century, physicists believed they had answered one of cosmology’s oldest questions: the universe would expand forever, its galaxies drifting into isolation until only our immediate neighborhood remained.

Comedy is a strange genre.

Rome wasn’t built in a day.

For as long as human beings have been writing about fantasy, myth, and science fiction, the dream of invisibility has always been a top priority.

In the output of AI, we see ourselves refracted through a strange new form of intelligence.

When the first commercial AI detectors arrived in late 2022 and early 2023, it wasn’t exactly an auspicious start.

I was in a suburban convenience store, near London’s outer rim, where the growing city bleeds into nature.

Over the past year or so, popular media has documented a growing number of cases of what psychiatrists have dubbed “AI psychosis.”

When a growing chorus of readers and critics accused Jamir Nazir, winner of the prestigious Commonwealth Short Story Prize, of using AI to write his winning entry, I did what any writer with a healthy amount of professional dread would do — I read it.

At a recent technology conference, Marc Lore, the billionaire cofounder of Diapers.com and Jet.com, was describing his newest venture.

Last December, I thought I was going to die.

In November 2022, I took on a writing assignment that, looking back, may have had a bigger impact on my life than any other: interview ChatGPT.

Like much modern fantasy, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series features magical objects.

Whenever the topic of dark matter comes up, the most common question that people wonder about it is whether this mysterious, hypothetical substance really exists, and whether it truly dominates the matter content in our Universe as thoroughly as its adher…

A rationalist blog forum popular in the Bay Area, LessWrong is known for its sprawling, hyper-logical takes on everything from AI research to optimal reproductive strategies.

There was a distinct moment when I stopped being a happy-go-lucky little girl, one who could play for hours alone at the bathroom sink with a set of colorful plastic nesting cups, and became someone who felt left behind and unseen.

“If we had put some of the stuff that’s happening today into the film back when we were making it, the studio would have told us we were being ridiculous,” James McTeigue, the director of the 2006 film V for Vendetta, tells Big Think.

It was way back in the 1600s — immediately following the invention of the telescope — that moons around planets other than Earth were discovered.

What is reality?

At the centers of galaxies, supermassive black holes reside.

One of the greatest open questions in all of the Universe today is just how abundant intelligent alien life is right at this very moment.

In 1936, a shipyard worker in Hamburg kept his arms folded while hundreds of men around him raised theirs for Hitler.

“A 1960s American retro-futurist city street.

A while back, I was at a party in London where a friend introduced me to an actress who had just been in a big theater production.

I need to move on and find my field plots, but pausing here has caused my feet to sink.

Could removing light be a key to discovering who you really are?

With frustration and fascination, I’ve come to begrudgingly accept that the questions I’m most interested in surface when I’m least equipped to answer them.

Jennifer Doudna, Nobel Prize winner, biochemist, and CRISPR co-inventor, breaks down how AI is already reshaping experimental biology: speeding up mundane tasks like data cleanup and formatting, and increasingly helping spot patterns in large datasets that

In terms of power, the only body of note in the Solar System is the Sun.

Consciousness remains the deepest puzzle in human science.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, best known for his discovery of calculus and ensuing mathematical feud with Isaac Newton, supported Descartes’s view on the separation of the brain and the mind.

There’s a whole entire Universe out there, and the more we learn about it as it actually is, the greater our potential becomes to achieve great things as a civilization, even if the path from knowledge to improving humanity is far from clear.

The 18th-century writer and polymath Samuel Johnson was seldom seen without a book.

If we ever hope to build a base, a city, or a full-fledged colony on another world, the first steps are to build structures that can support human existence.

How and where life first emerged on Earth is one of the great unsolved puzzles for scientists exploring the possibility of life on other worlds.