What do snowflakes, glowing street lamps, and Einstein’s “crazy” idea have in common? Physicist Brian Cox unwinds the surprising origins of quantum mechanics—the theory that shattered classical physics and redefined our understanding of reality.
From Kepler’s insight in a 17th-century snowstorm to Planck’s revolutionary leap in 1900, Cox traces how curiosity and confusion gave rise to the most baffling theory in science.
This video Brian Cox: The quantum roots of reality is featured on Big Think.
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If you’ve spent any time learning the craft of writing, you’ve undoubtedly heard your share of myths, opinions, and prejudices gussied up as hard-and-fast rules. Things like: You should write every day. Only write what you know. Bad grammar is a sign of an unintelligent person. You must know the rules to break them. And never, ever start a sentence with a conjunction.
One such “rule” that has always baffled me is the ban against writing with a thesaurus. I’ve heard it from fellow writers and English professors. I have friends who won’t touch one even to scratch out the occasional email or tweet. But the incarnation of this bad advice that has made the rounds online more than any other has to be Stephen King’s take:
“[T]hrow your thesaurus into the wastebasket. The only things creepier than a thesaurus are those little paperbacks college students too lazy to read the assigned novels buy around exam time. Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.”
In King’s defense, taken in ... Continue Reading »
One of my favorite childhood movies was Encino Man (1992), where a frozen Neanderthal — played by Brendan Fraser — is thawed out in a suburban L.A. garage.
Absurd, yes (and hilarious!) — but sometimes I wonder if we’re the ones being thawed out now, waking up each day to a world evolving faster than our brains can keep up.
As neuroscientists have shown (see here), our brains evolved to process information slowly. So today’s constant digital deluge often leads to stress, decision fatigue, and reduced productivity… Which is why, I think, we need to design our own mental software upgrades to survive this particular era.
Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s recent piece for Big Think offers one such upgrade — drawing on history and neuroscience to argue that curiosity isn’t just a feel-good, nice-to-have personality quirk. It’s a survival function. “We often think of change as something to endure,” she writes. “But change is how we grow. Curiosity activates dopaminergic pathways, strengthens hippocampal function, improves memory formation, and increases prediction error tolerance, which enhances our capacity to navigate uncertainty with greater flexibility and less ... Continue Reading »
What really happens to your mind in a crisis? We all think we know how we’d react in an emergency—but according to journalist and author Amanda Ripley, we’re usually wrong.
Drawing from interviews with real people in disasters—from plane crashes to terrorist attacks, research on human behavior under stress, and firsthand experience in disaster training, Ripley explores the psychological patterns that unfold in crisis: denial, deliberation, and decisive action.
This video Most people freeze in a crisis. Here’s why — and how to stop it is featured on Big Think.
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When we look out at our planet Earth from space, we see that even our home world itself comes in a myriad of diverse colors. The sky itself is blue, as the atmosphere preferentially scatters shorter-wavelength blue light in all directions, giving our atmosphere its characteristic color. The oceans themselves are blue, as water molecules are better at absorbing longer-wavelength red light than they are blue light. Meanwhile, the continents appear brown or green, dependent on the vegetation (or lack thereof) growing there, while icecaps, glaciers, and clouds always appear white.
However, that diversity of colors is not common to all planets. For example, on our neighboring world, Mars, one color dominates: red. The ground is red: red everywhere. The lowlands are red; the highlands are red; the dried-up riverbeds are red; the sand dunes are red; it’s all red. The atmosphere itself is also red in every location we can measure it. The lone exception to “red” appears to be the Martian icecaps and clouds, which are white, albeit tinted with a reddish hue as observed from Earth. Yet ... Continue Reading »
Humans can be mean, and the world is full of tragedy.
These things are almost certainly true, but they’re also fairly vacuous. They’re blunt and demonstrative. Saying something like “humans can fall in love” is not going to win any poetry prizes. The Booker Prize is not awarded to grand, sweeping statements about philosophically banal points.
The American novelist and screenwriter Richard Price once wrote that “the bigger the issue, the smaller you write. Remember that. You don’t write about the horrors of war. No. You write about a kid’s burnt socks lying on the road. You pick the smallest manageable part of the big thing, and you work off the resonance.”
The best writing is the kind where huge insights are found nestled in tiny, everyday moments. They have you zoom in on the tiniest of flowers and the smallest of eye movements, and there, in the minuscule, is the entire Universe. For this week’s Mini Philosophy, I spoke with the Booker Prize-winning author Paul Lynch about this idea — an idea that Lynch calls “cosmic realism.”
Cosmic realism
Lynch uses the term “cosmic ... Continue Reading »
A few years ago, in 2022, Google engineer Blake Lemoine was fired for claiming that the chatbot he was working on was sentient. He believed that it could feel things, potentially suffer, and that the moral status of large language models (LLMs) needed to be taken seriously. It turned out that it was Lemoine who was not taken seriously.
But a few weeks ago, Kyle Fish — who works as an “AI welfare researcher” for Anthropic — told the New York Times that there is a 15% chance that chatbots are already conscious. What’s changed?
One thing is that discussions about “AI consciousness” have moved from philosophical seminars (and pubs) to center-stage in academia, and out of the shadows in the tech industry, too. This transition, driven in large part by the astonishing progress in LLMs, is in one sense a good thing. If we did end up creating conscious machines, deliberately or not, we’d unleash an unprecedented moral crisis. We would introduce new potential for suffering in the world, at the click of a mouse, and of a kind we might ... Continue Reading »
John Amaechi knows what it takes to go from overlooked to unstoppable. The NBA veteran and psychologist reveals the mindset behind his success—how mastering the mundane, handling setbacks, and focusing on small, deliberate actions led him to achieve the extraordinary.
Success isn’t about talent—it’s about paying the FEE: Focus, Effort, Execution.
This video John Amaechi: The voice in your head is lying to you. Here’s how to shut it down is featured on Big Think.
Continue Reading »
Every once in a while, scientists will bite off more than they can chew. Just as we normally use that phrase to mean “taking on a task that’s beyond your means to accomplish with the resources you currently have,” that same limitation applies to a wide variety of scientific problems. Whereas the fundamental laws, particles, and interactions of the Universe are exquisitely well known (up to a point), the vast array of complex, composite structures that emerge from those basic building blocks of reality often attain properties that arise in a non-obvious way from their constituent parts.
Sometimes, by simulating many-body systems and imposing the proper boundary conditions, we can indeed derive large, macroscopically observable properties from those fundamental rules; the color of a sodium lamp is one such example, the success of a coaxial cable in transmitting radio-frequency signals is another.
At other times, however, the rules are a lot more complex, and we can only state that something happens (or must happen), lacking a full understanding of how it happens. Perhaps no puzzle that falls into this category is more ... Continue Reading »
David Perell has a way of making the internet feel small in the best possible sense. A gifted writer and even better connector, he’s built a career not just on publishing great ideas — but on knowing how to share them in a way that actually lands. His work lives at the intersection of writing, community-building, and long-term thinking.
What makes Perell stand out is that he doesn’t chase the typical metrics. He’s not particularly interested in how often you post or how many followers you have. What he really cares about is engagement. Real connection. Resonance. That’s the thing, he argues, that compounds over time.
In this conversation, we talk about how writing has changed — and what it takes to stand out now. Perell explains why we’re moving beyond the “age of distribution” (where winning meant getting your content seen) into something more meaningful: an “age of engagement,” where the real currency is trust and attention from the right people, not just more people.
He shares stories, frameworks, and lessons from teaching thousands of writers, and talks about why writing online ... Continue Reading »
If you’ve spent any time learning the craft of writing, you’ve undoubtedly heard your share of myths, opinions, and prejudices gussied up as hard-and-fast rules. Things like: You should write every day. Only write what you know. Bad grammar is a sign of an unintelligent person. You must know the rules to break them. And never, ever start a sentence with a conjunction.
One such “rule” that has always baffled me is the ban against writing with a thesaurus. I’ve heard it from fellow writers and English professors. I have friends who won’t touch one even to scratch out the occasional email or tweet. But the incarnation of this bad advice that has made the rounds online more than any other has to be Stephen King’s take:
“[T]hrow your thesaurus into the wastebasket. The only things creepier than a thesaurus are those little paperbacks college students too lazy to read the assigned novels buy around exam time. Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.”
In King’s defense, taken in ... 
One of my favorite childhood movies was Encino Man (1992), where a frozen Neanderthal — played by Brendan Fraser — is thawed out in a suburban L.A. garage.
Absurd, yes (and hilarious!) — but sometimes I wonder if we’re the ones being thawed out now, waking up each day to a world evolving faster than our brains can keep up.
As neuroscientists have shown (see here), our brains evolved to process information slowly. So today’s constant digital deluge often leads to stress, decision fatigue, and reduced productivity… Which is why, I think, we need to design our own mental software upgrades to survive this particular era.
Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s recent piece for Big Think offers one such upgrade — drawing on history and neuroscience to argue that curiosity isn’t just a feel-good, nice-to-have personality quirk. It’s a survival function. “We often think of change as something to endure,” she writes. “But change is how we grow. Curiosity activates dopaminergic pathways, strengthens hippocampal function, improves memory formation, and increases prediction error tolerance, which enhances our capacity to navigate uncertainty with greater flexibility and less ... 
When we look out at our planet Earth from space, we see that even our home world itself comes in a myriad of diverse colors. The sky itself is blue, as the atmosphere preferentially scatters shorter-wavelength blue light in all directions, giving our atmosphere its characteristic color. The oceans themselves are blue, as water molecules are better at absorbing longer-wavelength red light than they are blue light. Meanwhile, the continents appear brown or green, dependent on the vegetation (or lack thereof) growing there, while icecaps, glaciers, and clouds always appear white.
However, that diversity of colors is not common to all planets. For example, on our neighboring world, Mars, one color dominates: red. The ground is red: red everywhere. The lowlands are red; the highlands are red; the dried-up riverbeds are red; the sand dunes are red; it’s all red. The atmosphere itself is also red in every location we can measure it. The lone exception to “red” appears to be the Martian icecaps and clouds, which are white, albeit tinted with a reddish hue as observed from Earth. Yet ... 
Humans can be mean, and the world is full of tragedy.
These things are almost certainly true, but they’re also fairly vacuous. They’re blunt and demonstrative. Saying something like “humans can fall in love” is not going to win any poetry prizes. The Booker Prize is not awarded to grand, sweeping statements about philosophically banal points.
The American novelist and screenwriter Richard Price once wrote that “the bigger the issue, the smaller you write. Remember that. You don’t write about the horrors of war. No. You write about a kid’s burnt socks lying on the road. You pick the smallest manageable part of the big thing, and you work off the resonance.”
The best writing is the kind where huge insights are found nestled in tiny, everyday moments. They have you zoom in on the tiniest of flowers and the smallest of eye movements, and there, in the minuscule, is the entire Universe. For this week’s Mini Philosophy, I spoke with the Booker Prize-winning author Paul Lynch about this idea — an idea that Lynch calls “cosmic realism.”
Cosmic realism
Lynch uses the term “cosmic ... 
A few years ago, in 2022, Google engineer Blake Lemoine was fired for claiming that the chatbot he was working on was sentient. He believed that it could feel things, potentially suffer, and that the moral status of large language models (LLMs) needed to be taken seriously. It turned out that it was Lemoine who was not taken seriously.
But a few weeks ago, Kyle Fish — who works as an “AI welfare researcher” for Anthropic — told the New York Times that there is a 15% chance that chatbots are already conscious. What’s changed?
One thing is that discussions about “AI consciousness” have moved from philosophical seminars (and pubs) to center-stage in academia, and out of the shadows in the tech industry, too. This transition, driven in large part by the astonishing progress in LLMs, is in one sense a good thing. If we did end up creating conscious machines, deliberately or not, we’d unleash an unprecedented moral crisis. We would introduce new potential for suffering in the world, at the click of a mouse, and of a kind we might ... 
Every once in a while, scientists will bite off more than they can chew. Just as we normally use that phrase to mean “taking on a task that’s beyond your means to accomplish with the resources you currently have,” that same limitation applies to a wide variety of scientific problems. Whereas the fundamental laws, particles, and interactions of the Universe are exquisitely well known (up to a point), the vast array of complex, composite structures that emerge from those basic building blocks of reality often attain properties that arise in a non-obvious way from their constituent parts.
Sometimes, by simulating many-body systems and imposing the proper boundary conditions, we can indeed derive large, macroscopically observable properties from those fundamental rules; the color of a sodium lamp is one such example, the success of a coaxial cable in transmitting radio-frequency signals is another.
At other times, however, the rules are a lot more complex, and we can only state that something happens (or must happen), lacking a full understanding of how it happens. Perhaps no puzzle that falls into this category is more ... 
David Perell has a way of making the internet feel small in the best possible sense. A gifted writer and even better connector, he’s built a career not just on publishing great ideas — but on knowing how to share them in a way that actually lands. His work lives at the intersection of writing, community-building, and long-term thinking.
What makes Perell stand out is that he doesn’t chase the typical metrics. He’s not particularly interested in how often you post or how many followers you have. What he really cares about is engagement. Real connection. Resonance. That’s the thing, he argues, that compounds over time.
In this conversation, we talk about how writing has changed — and what it takes to stand out now. Perell explains why we’re moving beyond the “age of distribution” (where winning meant getting your content seen) into something more meaningful: an “age of engagement,” where the real currency is trust and attention from the right people, not just more people.
He shares stories, frameworks, and lessons from teaching thousands of writers, and talks about why writing online ...