No matter what you may have heard, make no mistake: physics is not “over” in any sense of the word. As far as we’ve come in our attempts to make sense of the world and Universe around us — and we have come impressively far — it’s absolutely disingenuous to pretend that we’ve solved and understood the natural world around us in any sort of satisfactory sense. We have two theories that work incredibly well: in all the years we’ve been testing them, we’ve never found a single observation or made a single experimental measurement that’s conflicted with either Einstein’s General Relativity or with the Standard Model’s predictions from quantum field theory.
If you want to know how gravitation works or what its effects on any object in the Universe will be, General Relativity has yet to let us down. From tabletop experiments to atomic clocks to celestial mechanics to gravitational lensing to the formation of the great cosmic web, its success rate is 100%. Similarly, for any particle physics experiment or interaction conceivable, whether mediated via the strong, weak, or ... Continue Reading »
Self-help tells us that we can fix anything with the right mindset, the right habits, the right 5-step plan. But what if that belief is doing more harm than good?
Historian Kate Bowler traces the deep roots of America’s obsession with self-making — from prosperity gospel theology to the endless productivity hacks of optimization culture. She explains how self-help promises control over things that are fundamentally fragile: our health, our time, our relationships, our lives.
The trouble is, we’re not machines to be upgraded. We’re human: breakable, dependent, and mortal. And any belief system that denies that will ultimately fail us.
This video The case against self-help is featured on Big Think.
Continue Reading »
The night sky, accessible to each of us, holds a sense of wonder unlike anything else.
Although extended objects, like the plane of the Milky Way and a few distant galaxies beyond our own, are identifiable with the naked eye, there are only a few thousand stars that can be seen and resolved with the naked eye. Depending on your eyesight and the darkness conditions, most humans can see between 6000 and 9000 stars if you could see the entire sky at once.
Credit: ESO/Håkon Dahle
For countless generations, humanity’s skyward gaze has revealed a heavenly abyss.
The effects of light pollution on what a naked-eye observer can see in the night sky. The artificial light produced by objects on the ground can wash out the naturally occurring objects in the night sky, rendering many objects unable to be seen. Light pollution can wash out all but the brightest meteors during a meteor shower.
Credit: Stellarium Labs
Today, light pollution and satellite contamination steal those pristine views from many of us.
This image of Venus and the Pleiades shows the tracks of Starlink satellites. The reflective surfaces ... Continue Reading »
Reshma Saujani says she was “always” moved by social justice. As a young girl, she witnessed her parents’ experience as immigrants in the U.S., and after working as a corporate attorney to help pay off her law school debt, she moved into activism.
Saujani founded Girls Who Code in 2011 — an organization that has trained nearly 600,000 young women in computer science — and now runs Moms First, which campaigns for better paid leave and child care provision. Along the way, she’s written several books, including the bestselling Brave, Not Perfect, and her podcast, My So-Called Midlife, aims to answer her daily question: “Is this it?”
In this interview with Big Think, she explores the “generic” culture she says we’ve gotten into, what workers need to be in the age of AI, and why she’s inspired by Bad Bunny.
Big Think: When you were 33, you left your job as a corporate attorney and decided to run for Congress. You were the first Indian-American woman to do so. What was that experience like, and what did you learn from it?
Saujani: I was ... Continue Reading »
Most weeks, I’m in a different American city. I fly in, catch an Uber, check into a hotel, and head to a convention center or a sequence of numbers posted on a nondescript high-rise. By Tuesday afternoon, it becomes difficult to remember where I am. The streets feel familiar. The buildings repeat the same glass, steel, and neutral palettes. Restaurants, retail strips, and conference centers blur together. Everything works. Almost nothing distinguishes one place from another.
These cities are not failing. They are functioning exactly as designed.
Week after week, I see the physical expression of a deeper logic, one that has reshaped not only our cities but our organizations. It is the work of a growing class of professionals I’ve come to think of as the Architects of Banality: leaders, planners, and managers who design systems to perform better and, in the process, make them increasingly indistinguishable.
They do not intend to drain the world of character. They optimize it away.
Once a year, that logic is interrupted when I travel to Yogyakarta, Indonesia. The contrast is immediate. Yogyakarta is inefficient by modern ... Continue Reading »
Throughout the entire Universe, no matter where or when we look, we see an endless variety of structures that have formed throughout all different stages of cosmic evolution. With a tremendous number of planets, stars, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and components of the great cosmic web, no two objects that we find are ever identical, although many features exhibit clear similarities. Underlying them all, the fundamental laws that they obey — from the quantum to the cosmic — never appear to change. From our cosmic backyard to galaxies found across the Universe:
gravity works the same way,
atoms exhibit the same quantum transitions,
and the fundamental constants all remain unchanged
throughout space and time.
But why is the Universe this way? Is there anything forbidding different regions from having different properties, laws, and constants? Or anything forbidding them from changing over time? That’s this week’s inquiry from our Patreon supporter Jeff Bonwick, who wants to know:
“Why does nature obey laws? It’s a relatively recent concept because most of what was observable to our ancestors was macroscopic — thunderstorms, earthquakes, volcanoes — and seemed entirely capricious, ... Continue Reading »
You haven’t been home in 10 long years. You’re exhausted, battle-scarred, and desperate to see your family. At last, a fair wind is at your back, and you stand on the deck of a bounding longship, sails set for home. For days you have strained your eyes against the horizon and now your native land appears. Closer and closer it comes. You can see the familiar flames of the harvest stubble fires. You recognize the cries of the shore birds and the scent of the pine trees. Finally you can relax. You haven’t slept for a week. You allow yourself to close your eyes … and you awake to a howling storm with no land in sight. You’ve been blown hundreds of miles away.
This, of course, is what happens to Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey. After 10 years of fighting at Troy, Odysseus gets within touching distance of Ithaca, only for his men to open the Aeolian bag and release its unfavorable winds. Thrown disastrously off course, it takes him another 10 years to get back to his wife and son. ... Continue Reading »
What if space and time aren’t the backdrop of the universe,but rather, are a byproduct of it? NASA astronomer Michelle Thaller makes the case that quantum entanglement may be the underlying fabric from which spacetime itself emerges.
This idea would mean that distance, gravity, and the passage of time are consequences of the deep interconnectedness created from the Big Bang.
This video Why modern physics is forcing us to rethink existence is featured on Big Think.
Continue Reading »
Sarah Bright, Head of L&D at Darktrace, built a manager development program from nothing. They trained 75% of their global managers across 20 cohorts in under two years. What follows is the practical detail behind how her team of three did it: the framework they built, how they measured success, and what she would tell anyone starting from the same place.
How the need was identified
Darktrace has seen rapid growth in employee count. With that growth came a pattern that will be familiar to many fast-scaling businesses: talented individual contributors being promoted into management with little to no formal training. “There wasn’t a shared language in what a manager is at Darktrace,” Sarah explained. People were drawing on whatever examples of management they had encountered, which varied enormously.
The signals were coming from multiple directions. Employee engagement survey data showed strong demand for career development and clarity on progression. Requests for training were arriving directly and frequently. When Darktrace’s first Chief People Officer joined in 2022, the case for a structured manager development program was already well-evidenced. Getting buy-in was less ... Continue Reading »
Four years ago, I read in the news that a boy I went to school with had been sentenced to 10 years in prison for manslaughter. On a different day, in a different place, he’d probably have just walked home, and no one would have said a thing.
It happened on a night out. Nick has always been a little bit lairy — a shouty, bargy, aggressive sort of boy. He was great on the rugby pitch, and we would just let him scream or punch a wall whenever he got into a tantrum. But at 19 years old, Nick was outside of a pub having a drink with his friends. Someone shoved past him and knocked his beer everywhere. Nick got angry. Nick always got angry. There was a bit of jostling, a bit of screaming, and Nick threw a punch.
The punch landed on the other man’s chin and threw him back into a shop window’s glass front. The glass shattered, and the shards sliced into this man’s carotid artery. He was dead before the ambulance arrived. Nick was arrested. ... Continue Reading »
No matter what you may have heard, make no mistake: physics is not “over” in any sense of the word. As far as we’ve come in our attempts to make sense of the world and Universe around us — and we have come impressively far — it’s absolutely disingenuous to pretend that we’ve solved and understood the natural world around us in any sort of satisfactory sense. We have two theories that work incredibly well: in all the years we’ve been testing them, we’ve never found a single observation or made a single experimental measurement that’s conflicted with either Einstein’s General Relativity or with the Standard Model’s predictions from quantum field theory.
If you want to know how gravitation works or what its effects on any object in the Universe will be, General Relativity has yet to let us down. From tabletop experiments to atomic clocks to celestial mechanics to gravitational lensing to the formation of the great cosmic web, its success rate is 100%. Similarly, for any particle physics experiment or interaction conceivable, whether mediated via the strong, weak, or ... 
The night sky, accessible to each of us, holds a sense of wonder unlike anything else.
Although extended objects, like the plane of the Milky Way and a few distant galaxies beyond our own, are identifiable with the naked eye, there are only a few thousand stars that can be seen and resolved with the naked eye. Depending on your eyesight and the darkness conditions, most humans can see between 6000 and 9000 stars if you could see the entire sky at once.
Credit: ESO/Håkon Dahle
For countless generations, humanity’s skyward gaze has revealed a heavenly abyss.
The effects of light pollution on what a naked-eye observer can see in the night sky. The artificial light produced by objects on the ground can wash out the naturally occurring objects in the night sky, rendering many objects unable to be seen. Light pollution can wash out all but the brightest meteors during a meteor shower.
Credit: Stellarium Labs
Today, light pollution and satellite contamination steal those pristine views from many of us.
This image of Venus and the Pleiades shows the tracks of Starlink satellites. The reflective surfaces ... 
Reshma Saujani says she was “always” moved by social justice. As a young girl, she witnessed her parents’ experience as immigrants in the U.S., and after working as a corporate attorney to help pay off her law school debt, she moved into activism.
Saujani founded Girls Who Code in 2011 — an organization that has trained nearly 600,000 young women in computer science — and now runs Moms First, which campaigns for better paid leave and child care provision. Along the way, she’s written several books, including the bestselling Brave, Not Perfect, and her podcast, My So-Called Midlife, aims to answer her daily question: “Is this it?”
In this interview with Big Think, she explores the “generic” culture she says we’ve gotten into, what workers need to be in the age of AI, and why she’s inspired by Bad Bunny.
Big Think: When you were 33, you left your job as a corporate attorney and decided to run for Congress. You were the first Indian-American woman to do so. What was that experience like, and what did you learn from it?
Saujani: I was ... 
Most weeks, I’m in a different American city. I fly in, catch an Uber, check into a hotel, and head to a convention center or a sequence of numbers posted on a nondescript high-rise. By Tuesday afternoon, it becomes difficult to remember where I am. The streets feel familiar. The buildings repeat the same glass, steel, and neutral palettes. Restaurants, retail strips, and conference centers blur together. Everything works. Almost nothing distinguishes one place from another.
These cities are not failing. They are functioning exactly as designed.
Week after week, I see the physical expression of a deeper logic, one that has reshaped not only our cities but our organizations. It is the work of a growing class of professionals I’ve come to think of as the Architects of Banality: leaders, planners, and managers who design systems to perform better and, in the process, make them increasingly indistinguishable.
They do not intend to drain the world of character. They optimize it away.
Once a year, that logic is interrupted when I travel to Yogyakarta, Indonesia. The contrast is immediate. Yogyakarta is inefficient by modern ... 
Throughout the entire Universe, no matter where or when we look, we see an endless variety of structures that have formed throughout all different stages of cosmic evolution. With a tremendous number of planets, stars, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and components of the great cosmic web, no two objects that we find are ever identical, although many features exhibit clear similarities. Underlying them all, the fundamental laws that they obey — from the quantum to the cosmic — never appear to change. From our cosmic backyard to galaxies found across the Universe:
gravity works the same way,
atoms exhibit the same quantum transitions,
and the fundamental constants all remain unchanged
throughout space and time.
But why is the Universe this way? Is there anything forbidding different regions from having different properties, laws, and constants? Or anything forbidding them from changing over time? That’s this week’s inquiry from our Patreon supporter Jeff Bonwick, who wants to know:
“Why does nature obey laws? It’s a relatively recent concept because most of what was observable to our ancestors was macroscopic — thunderstorms, earthquakes, volcanoes — and seemed entirely capricious, ... 
You haven’t been home in 10 long years. You’re exhausted, battle-scarred, and desperate to see your family. At last, a fair wind is at your back, and you stand on the deck of a bounding longship, sails set for home. For days you have strained your eyes against the horizon and now your native land appears. Closer and closer it comes. You can see the familiar flames of the harvest stubble fires. You recognize the cries of the shore birds and the scent of the pine trees. Finally you can relax. You haven’t slept for a week. You allow yourself to close your eyes … and you awake to a howling storm with no land in sight. You’ve been blown hundreds of miles away.
This, of course, is what happens to Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey. After 10 years of fighting at Troy, Odysseus gets within touching distance of Ithaca, only for his men to open the Aeolian bag and release its unfavorable winds. Thrown disastrously off course, it takes him another 10 years to get back to his wife and son. ... 
Sarah Bright, Head of L&D at Darktrace, built a manager development program from nothing. They trained 75% of their global managers across 20 cohorts in under two years. What follows is the practical detail behind how her team of three did it: the framework they built, how they measured success, and what she would tell anyone starting from the same place.
How the need was identified
Darktrace has seen rapid growth in employee count. With that growth came a pattern that will be familiar to many fast-scaling businesses: talented individual contributors being promoted into management with little to no formal training. “There wasn’t a shared language in what a manager is at Darktrace,” Sarah explained. People were drawing on whatever examples of management they had encountered, which varied enormously.
The signals were coming from multiple directions. Employee engagement survey data showed strong demand for career development and clarity on progression. Requests for training were arriving directly and frequently. When Darktrace’s first Chief People Officer joined in 2022, the case for a structured manager development program was already well-evidenced. Getting buy-in was less ... 
Four years ago, I read in the news that a boy I went to school with had been sentenced to 10 years in prison for manslaughter. On a different day, in a different place, he’d probably have just walked home, and no one would have said a thing.
It happened on a night out. Nick has always been a little bit lairy — a shouty, bargy, aggressive sort of boy. He was great on the rugby pitch, and we would just let him scream or punch a wall whenever he got into a tantrum. But at 19 years old, Nick was outside of a pub having a drink with his friends. Someone shoved past him and knocked his beer everywhere. Nick got angry. Nick always got angry. There was a bit of jostling, a bit of screaming, and Nick threw a punch.
The punch landed on the other man’s chin and threw him back into a shop window’s glass front. The glass shattered, and the shards sliced into this man’s carotid artery. He was dead before the ambulance arrived. Nick was arrested. ...