I was at a networking event a few years ago, making the kind of small talk that makes you question your entire personality. Everyone’s eyes were darting around the room. Conversations stalled after 30 seconds, and the energy in the place was restless, performative, and slightly desperate. In other words, it was a completely normal networking event.
What struck me was the paradox of it: Every single person in that room wanted to connect, yet nobody was managing to. You’d think that if both people want the same thing, getting there would be the easy part. Clearly, it wasn’t.
After about half an hour, a woman standing nearby turned to me with a completely relaxed smile and said, “These events are always so awkward, aren’t they?”
I felt my shoulders drop immediately. We started talking and couldn’t stop. Other people drifted over. By the end of the night, there was a full circle of people gravitating around her, lighting up as they spoke to her, following her as she moved around the room.
She hadn’t been the most impressive person there, or the funniest, ... Continue Reading »
The ultimate goal of physics is to accurately describe, as precisely as possible, exactly how every physical system that can exist in our Universe will behave. The laws of physics need to apply universally: the same rules must work for all particles and fields in all locations and at all times. They must be good enough so that, no matter what conditions exist or what experiments we perform, our theoretical predictions match, or at least are consistent with, the measured outcomes. And having predictive power, explicitly, means that if you know the initial conditions of your system and the laws that govern it, you can predict what the outcomes — or the relative probability of the set of possible outcomes — will always turn out to be.
The most successful physical theories of all fall into two separate categories:
the quantum field theories that describe each of the fundamental interactions (electromagnetic, weak nuclear, and strong nuclear) that occur between particles,
as well as general relativity, which describes spacetime and gravitation.
And yet, there’s one fundamental, overarching symmetry that applies to not just all of ... Continue Reading »
My heart pounded as I approached the stage. The grand wooden pavilion, filled with two hundred of my academic colleagues, stretched before me. I’d already delivered my keynote address the day before: “Dynamical Motifs as the Link Between Neurons and Cognition,” a lecture on how to use tools from artificial intelligence to better understand the human brain.
That talk had been a piece of cake.
It was today’s talk, part of the Growing Up in Science series — meant to showcase the human behind the scientist — that had me on edge. Previous speakers had opened up about the challenges of being first-generation Americans or overcoming gender bias in academia. But nobody had a story quite like mine.
I made it to the podium and surveyed the crowd. Waitstaff bustled around the tables, pouring beverages. It had taken forever for my colleagues to make their way through the buffet line, but they were all seated now around large round tables. My sweaty hands clung to my notes as I took a deep breath and tested the microphone. “Howdy, folks,” I said as I ... Continue Reading »
I’m on a deadline that is approaching fast to finish writing my next book, The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050. Luckily, my use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools has dramatically increased my productivity, so I should hit that deadline. But the increase in my own productivity has gotten me thinking a lot more about what happens when all knowledge workers get a lot more productive with AI.
I have written two comparable books in the era before AI, and each time I had a human research assistant to help me. They transcribed my interviews and verbal notes, located material I needed to read, researched areas I did not have time to explore myself, and helped fact-check my writing.
My AI research assistants have made me at least twice as productive as I was when I wrote my previous books with human assistants. There are obvious examples of how — AI needs mere seconds to transcribe interviews that would take my human assistants all day, and it can pull up any fact or concept in context, across virtually any field, almost instantly.
But there ... Continue Reading »
We would hope that the moment that we eternally live in, the “now,” would have a concrete scientific explanation. But the truth is far more complicated, says the relativity of simultaneity.
Jim Al-Khalili explains how the past and future are more fluid than we may think.
This video The present is a story your brain assembles after the fact is featured on Big Think.
Continue Reading »
What is the shape of the Universe? If you were born into this world anytime before the 1800s, it likely never would have occurred to you that the Universe itself was even permitted to have a shape. Like everyone else, you would have learned geometry starting from the rules of Euclid, where space can be no more complicated than a three-dimensional grid. After starting with that notion of absolute space, you would have applied Newton’s laws of physics, presuming (like everyone else) that the forces between any two objects would act along the one and only straight line connecting them. But we’ve come a long way in our understanding since then, and not only can space itself be curved by the presence of matter and energy, but we can witness and measure those effects directly.
It didn’t have to be the case that the Universe, as a whole, would have a spatial curvature to it that’s indistinguishable from flat. But that does seem to be the Universe we live in, despite the fact that our intuition might prefer it to be ... Continue Reading »
In the race to build better teams, organizations often turn to the latest productivity frameworks or data-driven performance technologies. Despite this relentless pursuit of efficiency, many workplaces remain creatively stunted, socially fragmented, and psychologically fatigued. What if the breakthrough your team needs isn’t another productivity tool, but a shift in what it sees every day?
Art is frequently relegated to decoration. It’s pleasant to look at but rarely integrated into corporate strategy. Art does more than improve aesthetics, though; it can be a catalyst for cognitive strength, emotional nuance, social intelligence, and mental wellbeing. A growing body of research across neuroscience, organizational psychology, and workplace design shows that art changes how teams think, feel, and interact. When organizations bring it into the workplace, their teams grow more adaptive, insightful, and connected.
Let’s examine five ways exposure to art can enhance your team’s performance.
#1 Art expands cognitive flexibility
Many businesses aim to develop a culture of innovation. Innovation is about adaptability: the ability to think across perspectives and generate new pathways of thought. That core capability is known as cognitive flexibility.
Emerging research in neuroaesthetics ... Continue Reading »
Astrophysicist Sara Seager has redefined how we search for life, shifting the focus from definitive proof to the subtler, messier realm of possibility.
By detecting biosignature gases — molecules that might indicate life in a planet’s atmosphere — her work explores what discovery looks like when certainty isn’t guaranteed. Volcanic gases and unknown chemistry can mimic life’s signals, meaning we may never get a perfect answer.
But Seager sees beauty in that ambiguity. In adapting the famous Drake Equation, she offers a new framework for discovery, one that embraces the “maybes” as part of the scientific process. For the first time in human history, she says, we’re finally in a position to try. And that alone is extraordinary.
This video The biggest obstacle to discovering life beyond Earth is featured on Big Think.
Continue Reading »
The closest supermassive black hole pair, in NGC 7727, was discovered in 2021.
The galaxy NGC 7727 shows extended spiral arms: likely the aftermath of a recent major merger between two comparably massive galaxies. The presence of two supermassive black holes inside this galaxy, as well as the extended streams of gas and stars, show one possible outcome of a major merger of two similar-mass, initially gas-rich galaxies.
Credit: ESO/VST ATLAS team. Acknowledgment: Durham University/CASU/WFAU
Just 89 million light-years away, these 154,000,000- and 6,300,000-solar-mass black holes are just 1,600 light-years apart.
A close-up (left) and wider-field (right) view of the central nucleus of the nearby galaxy NGC 7727. Just 89 million light-years away, it houses the closest pair of binary supermassive black holes known, with a separation of 1,600 light-years. While friction with the environment can lead supermassive black holes to closely approach one another, the final stages of an inspiral and merger should come due to gravitational wave emission. Binary supermassive black holes are fairly common at the centers of galaxies, representing about 1-in-1000 galactic systems.
Credit: ESO/Voggel et al.; ESO/VST ATLAS team. Acknowledgment: ... Continue Reading »
Kay woke before dawn to the sound of rain rattling the windows. She rose, washed her face, and was just getting dressed when she heard a gentle rap on the apartment door. Han Ying had invited a matronly friend — selected because of her happy marriage and large family — to comb Kay’s hair from girlhood braids into a married woman’s bun. It was the first ritual of Kay’s wedding day, November 21, 1910.
Earlier that year, Moy Sing and Han Ying had decided to find their oldest daughter a husband. They waited until Kay turned seventeen but saw no reason for further delay. After all, Kay was already three years older than Han Ying had been at the time of her own marriage. So Moy Sing asked local merchant Lee Weenom, an amateur matchmaker, to find Kay a suitable mate. The task was formidable, but not because of Moy Sing’s lack of wealth or social prominence. In 1910, fewer than forty single or widowed adult Chinese women lived in New York City, compared to about fifteen hundred single or widowed ... Continue Reading »
I was at a networking event a few years ago, making the kind of small talk that makes you question your entire personality. Everyone’s eyes were darting around the room. Conversations stalled after 30 seconds, and the energy in the place was restless, performative, and slightly desperate. In other words, it was a completely normal networking event.
What struck me was the paradox of it: Every single person in that room wanted to connect, yet nobody was managing to. You’d think that if both people want the same thing, getting there would be the easy part. Clearly, it wasn’t.
After about half an hour, a woman standing nearby turned to me with a completely relaxed smile and said, “These events are always so awkward, aren’t they?”
I felt my shoulders drop immediately. We started talking and couldn’t stop. Other people drifted over. By the end of the night, there was a full circle of people gravitating around her, lighting up as they spoke to her, following her as she moved around the room.
She hadn’t been the most impressive person there, or the funniest, ... 
The ultimate goal of physics is to accurately describe, as precisely as possible, exactly how every physical system that can exist in our Universe will behave. The laws of physics need to apply universally: the same rules must work for all particles and fields in all locations and at all times. They must be good enough so that, no matter what conditions exist or what experiments we perform, our theoretical predictions match, or at least are consistent with, the measured outcomes. And having predictive power, explicitly, means that if you know the initial conditions of your system and the laws that govern it, you can predict what the outcomes — or the relative probability of the set of possible outcomes — will always turn out to be.
The most successful physical theories of all fall into two separate categories:
the quantum field theories that describe each of the fundamental interactions (electromagnetic, weak nuclear, and strong nuclear) that occur between particles,
as well as general relativity, which describes spacetime and gravitation.
And yet, there’s one fundamental, overarching symmetry that applies to not just all of ... 
My heart pounded as I approached the stage. The grand wooden pavilion, filled with two hundred of my academic colleagues, stretched before me. I’d already delivered my keynote address the day before: “Dynamical Motifs as the Link Between Neurons and Cognition,” a lecture on how to use tools from artificial intelligence to better understand the human brain.
That talk had been a piece of cake.
It was today’s talk, part of the Growing Up in Science series — meant to showcase the human behind the scientist — that had me on edge. Previous speakers had opened up about the challenges of being first-generation Americans or overcoming gender bias in academia. But nobody had a story quite like mine.
I made it to the podium and surveyed the crowd. Waitstaff bustled around the tables, pouring beverages. It had taken forever for my colleagues to make their way through the buffet line, but they were all seated now around large round tables. My sweaty hands clung to my notes as I took a deep breath and tested the microphone. “Howdy, folks,” I said as I ... 
I’m on a deadline that is approaching fast to finish writing my next book, The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050. Luckily, my use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools has dramatically increased my productivity, so I should hit that deadline. But the increase in my own productivity has gotten me thinking a lot more about what happens when all knowledge workers get a lot more productive with AI.
I have written two comparable books in the era before AI, and each time I had a human research assistant to help me. They transcribed my interviews and verbal notes, located material I needed to read, researched areas I did not have time to explore myself, and helped fact-check my writing.
My AI research assistants have made me at least twice as productive as I was when I wrote my previous books with human assistants. There are obvious examples of how — AI needs mere seconds to transcribe interviews that would take my human assistants all day, and it can pull up any fact or concept in context, across virtually any field, almost instantly.
But there ... 
What is the shape of the Universe? If you were born into this world anytime before the 1800s, it likely never would have occurred to you that the Universe itself was even permitted to have a shape. Like everyone else, you would have learned geometry starting from the rules of Euclid, where space can be no more complicated than a three-dimensional grid. After starting with that notion of absolute space, you would have applied Newton’s laws of physics, presuming (like everyone else) that the forces between any two objects would act along the one and only straight line connecting them. But we’ve come a long way in our understanding since then, and not only can space itself be curved by the presence of matter and energy, but we can witness and measure those effects directly.
It didn’t have to be the case that the Universe, as a whole, would have a spatial curvature to it that’s indistinguishable from flat. But that does seem to be the Universe we live in, despite the fact that our intuition might prefer it to be ... 
In the race to build better teams, organizations often turn to the latest productivity frameworks or data-driven performance technologies. Despite this relentless pursuit of efficiency, many workplaces remain creatively stunted, socially fragmented, and psychologically fatigued. What if the breakthrough your team needs isn’t another productivity tool, but a shift in what it sees every day?
Art is frequently relegated to decoration. It’s pleasant to look at but rarely integrated into corporate strategy. Art does more than improve aesthetics, though; it can be a catalyst for cognitive strength, emotional nuance, social intelligence, and mental wellbeing. A growing body of research across neuroscience, organizational psychology, and workplace design shows that art changes how teams think, feel, and interact. When organizations bring it into the workplace, their teams grow more adaptive, insightful, and connected.
Let’s examine five ways exposure to art can enhance your team’s performance.
#1 Art expands cognitive flexibility
Many businesses aim to develop a culture of innovation. Innovation is about adaptability: the ability to think across perspectives and generate new pathways of thought. That core capability is known as cognitive flexibility.
Emerging research in neuroaesthetics ... 
The closest supermassive black hole pair, in NGC 7727, was discovered in 2021.
The galaxy NGC 7727 shows extended spiral arms: likely the aftermath of a recent major merger between two comparably massive galaxies. The presence of two supermassive black holes inside this galaxy, as well as the extended streams of gas and stars, show one possible outcome of a major merger of two similar-mass, initially gas-rich galaxies.
Credit: ESO/VST ATLAS team. Acknowledgment: Durham University/CASU/WFAU
Just 89 million light-years away, these 154,000,000- and 6,300,000-solar-mass black holes are just 1,600 light-years apart.
A close-up (left) and wider-field (right) view of the central nucleus of the nearby galaxy NGC 7727. Just 89 million light-years away, it houses the closest pair of binary supermassive black holes known, with a separation of 1,600 light-years. While friction with the environment can lead supermassive black holes to closely approach one another, the final stages of an inspiral and merger should come due to gravitational wave emission. Binary supermassive black holes are fairly common at the centers of galaxies, representing about 1-in-1000 galactic systems.
Credit: ESO/Voggel et al.; ESO/VST ATLAS team. Acknowledgment: ... 
Kay woke before dawn to the sound of rain rattling the windows. She rose, washed her face, and was just getting dressed when she heard a gentle rap on the apartment door. Han Ying had invited a matronly friend — selected because of her happy marriage and large family — to comb Kay’s hair from girlhood braids into a married woman’s bun. It was the first ritual of Kay’s wedding day, November 21, 1910.
Earlier that year, Moy Sing and Han Ying had decided to find their oldest daughter a husband. They waited until Kay turned seventeen but saw no reason for further delay. After all, Kay was already three years older than Han Ying had been at the time of her own marriage. So Moy Sing asked local merchant Lee Weenom, an amateur matchmaker, to find Kay a suitable mate. The task was formidable, but not because of Moy Sing’s lack of wealth or social prominence. In 1910, fewer than forty single or widowed adult Chinese women lived in New York City, compared to about fifteen hundred single or widowed ...