Smarter, Faster
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In his memoir Uncle Tungsten , British neurologist Oliver Sacks described two bombing incidents from his childhood during the Blitz. One involved a bomb that landed near his family’s home but failed to explode. The other involved a thermite bomb that fell behind the house, which Sacks remembered in vivid detail. A few months after the book came out, Sacks mentioned the incidents to his older…
Our starry skies make us wonder, “Is the Sun a typical star?” 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, but none of…
There is a paradox at the heart of being human. On the one hand, we have to make plans for the future. We go to jobs, book vacations, and save for our retirement. But on the other, life is never straightforward, and the best laid plans often go wrong. The old Yiddish proverb, “Man plans, and God laughs,” captures the limits of our ability to control the future. So how are we to resolve the…
In our Universe, in all directions and in all locations, there’s simply more “stuff” that space is full of everywhere we look. On the largest scales of all, the richest galaxy clusters and the sparsest cosmic voids average away, leaving us with a Universe that’s isotropic, homogeneous, and almost perfectly uniform. The oldest light in the Universe, the cosmic microwave background radiation, is a…
Talent isn’t a gift we’re born with – it’s a signal we’ve been reading completely wrong. Author Daniel Coyle breaks down the common traits shared by successful people, and why environment, not innate ability, is the variable that ties them all together. This video The invisible forces that create talent and elite performance is featured on Big Think .
The announcement made headlines. In October 2025, a group of researchers published a paper in a well-regarded, peer-reviewed astronomical journal claiming the extraordinary: They’d found evidence of objects orbiting the Earth years before the launch of any human-made artificial satellites. In another paper, they also claimed links between when these objects appeared in the sky and the dates of…
In 1883, the British physicist Joseph John Thomson wrote his master’s thesis, A Treatise on the Motion of Vortex Rings , exploring the fluid dynamics that govern the motion of phenomena like smoke rings and circular underwater vortices. It was brilliant. The essay laid the mathematical foundation for knot theory (the study of closed loops in three-dimensional space), showed that single rings could…
When we divide up matter into the smallest possible chunks that it’s made of — into the stuff that can be divided or split no further — those indivisible things we arrive at are known as fundamental particles: the elementary quanta that compose our Universe. But unlike the macroscopic, familiar objects that make up our world, we can’t simply assign definitive properties to them like “position” and…
Terence Tao has spent decades solving problems most people can’t even state, and he says he’s never had a single eureka moment. In this conversation, the UCLA mathematician and Fields Medalist breaks math down to six essential ideas: numbers, algebra, geometry, probability, analysis, and dynamics. This video The world’s greatest mathematician explains 6 essential concepts of math is featured on…
If you’ve ever been curious about the world you live in, you’ve probably wondered why the sky is blue. It’s a question that most children ask at some point in their lives, but the answers that adults give them often don’t align with our physical reality. Some of the more common incorrect answers that people often give in response include: that sunlight has a blue tint, that oxygen itself is a…
Alan Love studies how scientists think about life, purpose, and agency. In this full interview, he offers a wide-ranging guide to purpose in living systems, moving across biology, medicine, artificial intelligence, and the structure of science itself. He explores what it means for organisms to act with direction, why agency matters at multiple scales, and how ideas like function and goal-directed…
