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Science & Tech
Explore the discoveries that reveal how the world works, alongside the technologies that extend, reshape, and sometimes challenge what’s possible.
13mins
“People got skeptical, fearful, doubtful of the very idea of progress in the 20th century and we allowed that to slow down progress itself.”
We first measured G, the gravitational constant, back in the 18th century. As the least well-known fundamental constant, can it be improved?
Welcome to The Nightcrawler — a weekly newsletter from Eric Markowitz covering tech, innovation, and long-term thinking.
In 2017, a kilonova sent light and gravitational waves across the Universe. Here on Earth, there was a 1.7 second signal arrival delay. Why?
NASA’s Caleb Scharf talks with Big Think about life’s long experiment in expansion.
Dark matter, dark energy, and the Big Bang are all part of a solid scientific foundation. Here's why popular media often claims otherwise.
13mins
“Chance invents and natural selection propagates that chance invention.”
What if the first search for life beyond Earth actually succeeded?
Planets grow from protostellar material in disks, leading to full-grown planetary systems in time. At last, the final gap has been filled.
We chat with Mark Klarzynski, founder of PEAK:AIO, on how his company became an international player in data storage for the age of AI.
Until the late 20th century, there wasn't a truly universal standard. Under our current definition, everyone agrees on what "one meter" is.
Do aliens speak the same physics that we do, with similar laws, observables, and underlying mathematics. Maybe not, argues Daniel Whiteson.
We've now detected hundreds of gravitational waves with LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA. What if we tried Weber's original method in the modern day?
16mins
“The messy reality of it is that all of these very smart people, including Isaac Newton, were talking to other people.”
The great books aren’t just classics — they’re cultural Schelling points that give our minds a place to meet up in the world of ideas.
The first world beyond Earth for human habitability should be the Moon, not Mars. This is why we should terraform our lunar neighbor first.
Fibonacci’s "Liber Abaci" not only revolutionized commerce — it also helped nudge the world towards reasoned, quantitative enquiry.
Times dilate and lengths contract near the speed of light. Bizarre and confusing? Sure. But under relativity, it can't be any other way.
In this excerpt from "The Shortest History of AI," Toby Walsh explores the history of the Logic Theorist, the first AI to prove mathematical theorems.
13mins
“Over the last 10 or 15 years, scientists have really started to understand the fundamental underlying biology of the aging process. And they broke this down into 12 hallmarks of aging.”