“There is nothing in the world more powerful than a good story,” Tyrion Lannister, played by Peter Dinklage, declares in the infamously lackluster finale of Game of Thrones. It sounds cliché, but in Westeros, it’s true.
The books the TV show is based on are called A Song of Ice and Fire, not “a history” or “an account.” Throughout the novels, characters tell stories to persuade, intimidate, and outmaneuver each other. Many live and die convinced that random chance is divine providence. Even political power, the axis around which the entire plot revolves, is a narrative — “a shadow on the wall,” as Varys the spymaster puts it.
Storytelling plays an equally important role in our world, Kevin Ashton argues in his new book, The Story of Stories. In fact, stories may play an even more important role as, unlike the citizens of Westeros, we have modern technology at our disposal.
“I wanted to write a book about how the smartphone changed the world,” Ashton, a tech pioneer and co-founder of MIT’s Auto-ID Lab, tells Big Think, “but the more I researched, the ... Continue Reading »
Most of us think we can spot a psychopath from a mile away, but we likely already have, and didn’t even know it. Far from the cartoonishly evil perception that most of us have, psychopathy is more about emotional deficits hidden behind a veneer of normalcy.
Abigail Marsh unpacks what defines psychopathy, how it differs from antisocial behavior, and why terms like “sociopath” only add confusion.
This video A look into the mind of someone without empathy is featured on Big Think.
Continue Reading »
One of the most puzzling facets of our Universe is the apparent need for a new form of mass in our cosmos that isn’t made up of any of the particles we know of: dark matter. Whereas we’re fully aware of the full suite of Standard Model particles — quarks, charged leptons, neutrinos, their antiparticles, plus the photon, the gluons, the W-and-Z bosons, and the Higgs boson — dark matter must be composed of something else entirely: something novel and not yet directly detected. In order to explain the cosmic structures we see, from the CMB to individual galaxies to galaxy clusters and even the grand cosmic web, dark matter must not only be present, but must dominate the total matter content of the Universe.
However, there are several puzzles that arise. If dark matter is real, and if it dominates the matter content of the Universe, then there should be large numbers of satellite galaxies, small and low-mass collections of a few stars but mostly dark matter, all throughout intergalactic space. When those galaxies form stars from their normal matter, ... Continue Reading »
MIT researcher Sharon Gilad-Gutnick has witnessed many children see for the first time. After having their cataracts surgically removed, the children can see the world but don’t recognize faces well. Even among those who can recognize the faces of their parents or others they know well, most don’t look at the faces of the people they speak with.
“If we told them to look at the face, they could usually manage it,” Gilad-Gutnick told Big Think. “But they were mostly looking at the hands.”
Gilad-Gutnick works with these children as part of Project Prakash, an initiative that provides care to children and adults with congenital blindness in India and investigates the neuroscience of sight restoration. Congenital cataracts are a preventable cause of blindness and are often treatable within two months of birth. However, due to a lack of access to cataract screening and surgery, many children in developing countries are often treated too late, if at all.
The Prakash children eventually learn to look at faces when spoken to — usually a few months after their surgeries. Their experiences reveal that seeing doesn’t ... Continue Reading »
In the middle of the 20th century, the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle coined one of the most influential phrases in modern thought: “the ghost in the machine.” He was challenging Cartesian dualism, the idea that the human mind is an invisible pilot steering the body from somewhere behind the eyes. Ryle called this a category mistake. There was no ghost hidden inside the machinery of the human body. Intelligence did not float above behavior; it emerged from it.
Sixty years later, we face a strange reversal.
Instead of imagining a ghost inside ourselves, we are quietly relocating our agency into the machines we build. We are becoming accountable for decisions we no longer meaningfully author.
The inversion is easy to miss. Ryle argued that there was no separate mind steering the body. Today, we are drifting back toward a pre-20th-century mindset, except this time the “mind” is artificial. We allow intelligent systems to frame problems, rank options, and recommend outcomes. Then we step in to execute what they have already determined.
We did not discover a ghost inside the machine.We moved the ghost.
The result ... Continue Reading »
Astrophysicist Sara Seager has spent decades expanding how we search for life beyond Earth: not by asking what we would look like out there, but by imagining forms of intelligence that may be utterly unlike our own.
Her work explores “technosignatures” — physical clues of advanced life, from satellite swarms to artificial light. As artificial intelligence accelerates here on Earth, Seager considers whether post-biological life might be what awaits us — and whether it already exists elsewhere in the cosmos. Our biggest challenge, she suggests, may be learning to see past the limits of our own imagination.
This video We’ve been looking for life. Here’s why we should look for intelligence instead is featured on Big Think.
Continue Reading »
Our Sun gravitationally dominates the Solar System.
Here in our own Solar System, the Sun dominates the spacetime within it in nearly all locations. Whereas the environment close to a planet is locally dominated by that planet’s gravity, and the ensuing curvature it imprints on the surrounding spacetime, the Sun’s gravity dominates the larger Solar System environment. Whereas a spacecraft must achieve speeds of 11 km/s to escape from Earth’s gravity, speeds nearly four times as great must be achieved at the Earth-Sun distance to escape from the Solar System entirely.
Credit: T. Pyle/Caltech/MIT/LIGO Lab
Of over 17,000 payloads launched into space, only six will escape the Solar System’s gravity.
The most remarkable fact about Pioneer 10’s trajectory is that it gained nearly the maximum amount of velocity possible from a gravitational encounter with Jupiter. After becoming the first spacecraft to reach Jupiter in late 1973, it became the first spacecraft to achieve escape velocity in the Solar System. It remained our most distant spacecraft until 1998, when Voyager 1 surpassed it, and will fall to third place in 2023, when Voyager 2 overtakes ... Continue Reading »
Your brain isn’t broken, but it may seem like that because of how the screen age overwhelms your biology.
Neurologist Richard Cytowic argues that attention is a finite energy budget, not a virtue, and modern life is engineered to exhaust it.
This video The biological necessity of boredom in the age of screens is featured on Big Think.
Continue Reading »
What if the world’s most critical technology isn’t software, but the tiny pieces of silicon that power it? In an age where chips are everywhere, from smartphones to coffee makers, their manufacturing complexity might surprise you. It’s harder to make a modern semiconductor than a nuclear weapon.
Making this tech both very inexpensive and very small is incredibly difficult. That’s why there’s just a couple of companies in the world who are capable of it.
This video The tiny transistors remaking our global order is featured on Big Think.
Continue Reading »
Here in our Universe, there’s a big puzzle at the heart of every black hole. According to Einstein’s general relativity, for every black hole that exists within the Universe, there are only three properties that go into it that matter in any way:
the black hole’s total mass,
the black hole’s net electric charge,
and the black hole’s intrinsic angular momentum,
and that’s it. It doesn’t matter what type of matter (or antimatter, or dark matter) went into the black hole in order to form it; all that matters is its mass, charge, and angular momentum.
But in addition to a Universe governed by Einstein’s general relativity, we also live in an inherently quantum Universe. Quantum mechanically, there are all sorts of bizarre phenomena that cannot be avoided, from uncertainty to entanglement. It’s that latter property, entanglement, that led to this week’s big question, coming from Patreon supporter Jeff Bonwick, who wants to know:
“If two particles are entangled, and one of them crosses a black hole’s event horizon, does that break the entanglement? Or can we measure the particle that’s outside the black hole and ... Continue Reading »
“There is nothing in the world more powerful than a good story,” Tyrion Lannister, played by Peter Dinklage, declares in the infamously lackluster finale of Game of Thrones. It sounds cliché, but in Westeros, it’s true.
The books the TV show is based on are called A Song of Ice and Fire, not “a history” or “an account.” Throughout the novels, characters tell stories to persuade, intimidate, and outmaneuver each other. Many live and die convinced that random chance is divine providence. Even political power, the axis around which the entire plot revolves, is a narrative — “a shadow on the wall,” as Varys the spymaster puts it.
Storytelling plays an equally important role in our world, Kevin Ashton argues in his new book, The Story of Stories. In fact, stories may play an even more important role as, unlike the citizens of Westeros, we have modern technology at our disposal.
“I wanted to write a book about how the smartphone changed the world,” Ashton, a tech pioneer and co-founder of MIT’s Auto-ID Lab, tells Big Think, “but the more I researched, the ... 
One of the most puzzling facets of our Universe is the apparent need for a new form of mass in our cosmos that isn’t made up of any of the particles we know of: dark matter. Whereas we’re fully aware of the full suite of Standard Model particles — quarks, charged leptons, neutrinos, their antiparticles, plus the photon, the gluons, the W-and-Z bosons, and the Higgs boson — dark matter must be composed of something else entirely: something novel and not yet directly detected. In order to explain the cosmic structures we see, from the CMB to individual galaxies to galaxy clusters and even the grand cosmic web, dark matter must not only be present, but must dominate the total matter content of the Universe.
However, there are several puzzles that arise. If dark matter is real, and if it dominates the matter content of the Universe, then there should be large numbers of satellite galaxies, small and low-mass collections of a few stars but mostly dark matter, all throughout intergalactic space. When those galaxies form stars from their normal matter, ... 
MIT researcher Sharon Gilad-Gutnick has witnessed many children see for the first time. After having their cataracts surgically removed, the children can see the world but don’t recognize faces well. Even among those who can recognize the faces of their parents or others they know well, most don’t look at the faces of the people they speak with.
“If we told them to look at the face, they could usually manage it,” Gilad-Gutnick told Big Think. “But they were mostly looking at the hands.”
Gilad-Gutnick works with these children as part of Project Prakash, an initiative that provides care to children and adults with congenital blindness in India and investigates the neuroscience of sight restoration. Congenital cataracts are a preventable cause of blindness and are often treatable within two months of birth. However, due to a lack of access to cataract screening and surgery, many children in developing countries are often treated too late, if at all.
The Prakash children eventually learn to look at faces when spoken to — usually a few months after their surgeries. Their experiences reveal that seeing doesn’t ... 
In the middle of the 20th century, the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle coined one of the most influential phrases in modern thought: “the ghost in the machine.” He was challenging Cartesian dualism, the idea that the human mind is an invisible pilot steering the body from somewhere behind the eyes. Ryle called this a category mistake. There was no ghost hidden inside the machinery of the human body. Intelligence did not float above behavior; it emerged from it.
Sixty years later, we face a strange reversal.
Instead of imagining a ghost inside ourselves, we are quietly relocating our agency into the machines we build. We are becoming accountable for decisions we no longer meaningfully author.
The inversion is easy to miss. Ryle argued that there was no separate mind steering the body. Today, we are drifting back toward a pre-20th-century mindset, except this time the “mind” is artificial. We allow intelligent systems to frame problems, rank options, and recommend outcomes. Then we step in to execute what they have already determined.
We did not discover a ghost inside the machine.We moved the ghost.
The result ... 
Our Sun gravitationally dominates the Solar System.
Here in our own Solar System, the Sun dominates the spacetime within it in nearly all locations. Whereas the environment close to a planet is locally dominated by that planet’s gravity, and the ensuing curvature it imprints on the surrounding spacetime, the Sun’s gravity dominates the larger Solar System environment. Whereas a spacecraft must achieve speeds of 11 km/s to escape from Earth’s gravity, speeds nearly four times as great must be achieved at the Earth-Sun distance to escape from the Solar System entirely.
Credit: T. Pyle/Caltech/MIT/LIGO Lab
Of over 17,000 payloads launched into space, only six will escape the Solar System’s gravity.
The most remarkable fact about Pioneer 10’s trajectory is that it gained nearly the maximum amount of velocity possible from a gravitational encounter with Jupiter. After becoming the first spacecraft to reach Jupiter in late 1973, it became the first spacecraft to achieve escape velocity in the Solar System. It remained our most distant spacecraft until 1998, when Voyager 1 surpassed it, and will fall to third place in 2023, when Voyager 2 overtakes ... 
Here in our Universe, there’s a big puzzle at the heart of every black hole. According to Einstein’s general relativity, for every black hole that exists within the Universe, there are only three properties that go into it that matter in any way:
the black hole’s total mass,
the black hole’s net electric charge,
and the black hole’s intrinsic angular momentum,
and that’s it. It doesn’t matter what type of matter (or antimatter, or dark matter) went into the black hole in order to form it; all that matters is its mass, charge, and angular momentum.
But in addition to a Universe governed by Einstein’s general relativity, we also live in an inherently quantum Universe. Quantum mechanically, there are all sorts of bizarre phenomena that cannot be avoided, from uncertainty to entanglement. It’s that latter property, entanglement, that led to this week’s big question, coming from Patreon supporter Jeff Bonwick, who wants to know:
“If two particles are entangled, and one of them crosses a black hole’s event horizon, does that break the entanglement? Or can we measure the particle that’s outside the black hole and ...