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 across the electromagnetic spectrum, from the highest-energy gamma-rays through X-rays, ultraviolet, optical, infrared, and even microwave wavelengths. Whenever we consider building a new observatory, the big thing that scientists focus on is what we call discovery potential, or “how much” ability there is to see beyond the limits of our current instruments and observatories.
Not all wavelengths have received equal attention, however, and some wavelengths have been woefully neglected in recent years. In particular, the most powerful X-ray observatory in human history remains NASA’s Chandra, despite the fact that Chandra was launched all the way back in 1999: back in the 20th century. Plans for a future X-ray flagship were developed, laid out, and approved, with the next big step towards that goal being NASA’s AXIS mission: a true 21st century X-ray facility that would help ... 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 spiral inward; radiation and strange gravitational waves emanate outward.
But from this outside view, observing the singularity inside the black hole is impossible. The event horizon blocks all attempts. Similarly, as outside observers, we cannot directly access the conscious experiences of other beings. When we focus our third-person scientific tools on the places we suspect our mental lives to reside — namely, our brains (and bodies, more generally) — all we see is the stuff of physical reality: electrical activity, neurochemicals, and bodily tissues. No feelings, no emotions, no love. Our own inner cosmos of intentions, beliefs, and dreams is knowable only to ourselves.
Modern science tends to see consciousness as arising from neural activity, like ghostly software conjured through the brain’s material hardware. A radical new theory suggests something different: The brain doesn’t only ... 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.
“It will come back,” Lamott said.
He nodded briefly and repeated: “It will come back.”
And it did. “Oh!” Allen said, facing the screen, and off we went.
It was a small exchange, the kind you might expect from a married couple, but I jotted it down anyway, sensing it may prove significant. As we talked, the two continued to finish each other’s thoughts, nudging one another forward, even setting the record straight. (At one point, Lamott said Allen introduced his 36 “writing rules” on their second date. Allen reminded her: “In the book, you say it was the fourth or fifth.”)
I realized that their back-and-forth mirrored Good Writing’s structure, but in an improvised miniature. The premise of the book is straightforward: one by one, Allen goes through the 36 writing rules he’s picked up across his decades-long ... 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 that image biological tissue using light and not touch.
This video The idea so strange Einstein thought it broke quantum physics is featured on Big Think.
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 observations, acquire new data, better determine key parameters about whatever it is we’re investigating, but in a way that doesn’t invalidate or revolutionize our prior understanding. On the other hand, there are also scientific revolutions: where a new discovery, or sometimes even just a new theoretical framework, blows up our old scientific foundation, and demands that we replace it with an entirely new conception about how some phenomenon in the Universe actually works.
This latter class of advances — representing huge shifts in our scientific foundations — have happened many times before. Examples include:
Kepler’s development of a heliocentric solar system with elliptical planetary orbits,
the theory of continental drift and plate tectonics for describing Earth’s crust,
Darwin’s theory of evolution, guided by the mechanism of natural selection and random mutations,
and Einstein’s overthrow of Newtonian gravity, replacing it with general relativity.
These advances, in contrast ... 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, personality tendencies, decluttering, and the five senses followed. Today, she also dispenses wisdom on her podcast Happier with Gretchen Rubin, on which her sister Elizabeth Craft acts as co-host and guinea pig. Last year, Rubin launched a second podcast, Since You Asked, which she presents with the psychotherapist Lori Gottlieb.
Big Think caught up with Rubin for a chat about happiness, habits, and how we can best meet our own expectations — even when we put everyone else first.
Big Think: What tips do you have for Big Think readers to work and live smarter this year?
Rubin: One thing that you can do, and I mention this because so many people tell me that it changed their lives, is to follow the one-minute rule. Anything you can do without delay in a minute, go ... 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 a reason. And not all pain is a lesson.
Bowler argues that grief deserves the dignity of honesty, not reframing. Instead of rearranging the past to find meaning, she suggests asking a different question: What’s left? And what might still be beautiful?
This video Why pain doesn’t need to teach you anything is featured on Big Think.
Continue Reading »
Whenever stars are born, their masses determine 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 known O- or B-class star within 25 parsecs. Our Sun is a G-class star, along with about 5-10% of total stars. However, in the early Universe, almost all of the stars were O- or B-class stars, with an average mass 25 times greater than average stars today. In general, more massive stars live shorter lives, and die in more explosive fates.
Credit: LucasVB/Wikimedia Commons; Annotations: E. Siegel
Sun-like stars evolve into giants, blow off their outer layers, and contract: forming white dwarfs.
From their earliest beginnings to their final extent before fading away, Sun-like stars will grow from their present size to the size of a red giant (~the Earth’s orbit) to up to ~5 light-years in diameter, typically. The largest known planetary nebulae can reach approximately double that size, up to ~10 light-years across. Typically, stars born with 8 solar masses or ... 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 stars at once, as well as deep-sky objects, the plane of the Milky Way, and only the rare, occasional satellite streak. As time went on, more and more satellites were launched, bringing us up to around 2000 active satellites as of 2019.
And then we entered the era of satellite megaconstellations, beginning with the launch of the first Starlink satellites. Now, nearly 7 full years later, there are over 17,000 active and defunct satellite payloads in orbit, with approximately 100 times as many satellites proposed in the coming years. From satellite communications to direct-to-phone links to the proposition of AI data centers in space, the number of proposed use cases has exploded. However, as the environment around Earth becomes more crowded, the risks, the harms, and the ... 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 philosophy. Intelligence with action is civilization.
Much of what we’ve seen from the biggest artificial intelligence (AI) companies has revolved around words: You go to their chatbot, ask it a question, and it responds. Over the past couple of years, some have taken this a step further with AI agents — those can actually do things, but only things you’ve told them to do.
The next frontier in AI is not better chat. It is not even better agents. The next frontier is proactive AI, the kind that takes action, learns in real time, and, critically, comes to you before you go to it. This distinction is not a feature improvement. It is a civilizational pivot.
The asymmetry that defines our era
This is the current architecture of human-AI interaction. You wake up. You remember you need to do something, like plan a trip. You open ... 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 across the electromagnetic spectrum, from the highest-energy gamma-rays through X-rays, ultraviolet, optical, infrared, and even microwave wavelengths. Whenever we consider building a new observatory, the big thing that scientists focus on is what we call discovery potential, or “how much” ability there is to see beyond the limits of our current instruments and observatories.
Not all wavelengths have received equal attention, however, and some wavelengths have been woefully neglected in recent years. In particular, the most powerful X-ray observatory in human history remains NASA’s Chandra, despite the fact that Chandra was launched all the way back in 1999: back in the 20th century. Plans for a future X-ray flagship were developed, laid out, and approved, with the next big step towards that goal being NASA’s AXIS mission: a true 21st century X-ray facility that would help ... 
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 spiral inward; radiation and strange gravitational waves emanate outward.
But from this outside view, observing the singularity inside the black hole is impossible. The event horizon blocks all attempts. Similarly, as outside observers, we cannot directly access the conscious experiences of other beings. When we focus our third-person scientific tools on the places we suspect our mental lives to reside — namely, our brains (and bodies, more generally) — all we see is the stuff of physical reality: electrical activity, neurochemicals, and bodily tissues. No feelings, no emotions, no love. Our own inner cosmos of intentions, beliefs, and dreams is knowable only to ourselves.
Modern science tends to see consciousness as arising from neural activity, like ghostly software conjured through the brain’s material hardware. A radical new theory suggests something different: The brain doesn’t only ... 
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.
“It will come back,” Lamott said.
He nodded briefly and repeated: “It will come back.”
And it did. “Oh!” Allen said, facing the screen, and off we went.
It was a small exchange, the kind you might expect from a married couple, but I jotted it down anyway, sensing it may prove significant. As we talked, the two continued to finish each other’s thoughts, nudging one another forward, even setting the record straight. (At one point, Lamott said Allen introduced his 36 “writing rules” on their second date. Allen reminded her: “In the book, you say it was the fourth or fifth.”)
I realized that their back-and-forth mirrored Good Writing’s structure, but in an improvised miniature. The premise of the book is straightforward: one by one, Allen goes through the 36 writing rules he’s picked up across his decades-long ... 
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 observations, acquire new data, better determine key parameters about whatever it is we’re investigating, but in a way that doesn’t invalidate or revolutionize our prior understanding. On the other hand, there are also scientific revolutions: where a new discovery, or sometimes even just a new theoretical framework, blows up our old scientific foundation, and demands that we replace it with an entirely new conception about how some phenomenon in the Universe actually works.
This latter class of advances — representing huge shifts in our scientific foundations — have happened many times before. Examples include:
Kepler’s development of a heliocentric solar system with elliptical planetary orbits,
the theory of continental drift and plate tectonics for describing Earth’s crust,
Darwin’s theory of evolution, guided by the mechanism of natural selection and random mutations,
and Einstein’s overthrow of Newtonian gravity, replacing it with general relativity.
These advances, in contrast ... 
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, personality tendencies, decluttering, and the five senses followed. Today, she also dispenses wisdom on her podcast Happier with Gretchen Rubin, on which her sister Elizabeth Craft acts as co-host and guinea pig. Last year, Rubin launched a second podcast, Since You Asked, which she presents with the psychotherapist Lori Gottlieb.
Big Think caught up with Rubin for a chat about happiness, habits, and how we can best meet our own expectations — even when we put everyone else first.
Big Think: What tips do you have for Big Think readers to work and live smarter this year?
Rubin: One thing that you can do, and I mention this because so many people tell me that it changed their lives, is to follow the one-minute rule. Anything you can do without delay in a minute, go ... 
Whenever stars are born, their masses determine 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 known O- or B-class star within 25 parsecs. Our Sun is a G-class star, along with about 5-10% of total stars. However, in the early Universe, almost all of the stars were O- or B-class stars, with an average mass 25 times greater than average stars today. In general, more massive stars live shorter lives, and die in more explosive fates.
Credit: LucasVB/Wikimedia Commons; Annotations: E. Siegel
Sun-like stars evolve into giants, blow off their outer layers, and contract: forming white dwarfs.
From their earliest beginnings to their final extent before fading away, Sun-like stars will grow from their present size to the size of a red giant (~the Earth’s orbit) to up to ~5 light-years in diameter, typically. The largest known planetary nebulae can reach approximately double that size, up to ~10 light-years across. Typically, stars born with 8 solar masses or ... 
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 stars at once, as well as deep-sky objects, the plane of the Milky Way, and only the rare, occasional satellite streak. As time went on, more and more satellites were launched, bringing us up to around 2000 active satellites as of 2019.
And then we entered the era of satellite megaconstellations, beginning with the launch of the first Starlink satellites. Now, nearly 7 full years later, there are over 17,000 active and defunct satellite payloads in orbit, with approximately 100 times as many satellites proposed in the coming years. From satellite communications to direct-to-phone links to the proposition of AI data centers in space, the number of proposed use cases has exploded. However, as the environment around Earth becomes more crowded, the risks, the harms, and the ... 
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 philosophy. Intelligence with action is civilization.
Much of what we’ve seen from the biggest artificial intelligence (AI) companies has revolved around words: You go to their chatbot, ask it a question, and it responds. Over the past couple of years, some have taken this a step further with AI agents — those can actually do things, but only things you’ve told them to do.
The next frontier in AI is not better chat. It is not even better agents. The next frontier is proactive AI, the kind that takes action, learns in real time, and, critically, comes to you before you go to it. This distinction is not a feature improvement. It is a civilizational pivot.
The asymmetry that defines our era
This is the current architecture of human-AI interaction. You wake up. You remember you need to do something, like plan a trip. You open ...