Big Think

If you haven’t read Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, you’ve certainly heard of them — if not in school, then on Instagram, TikTok, or a podcast. Composed by the second-century Roman emperor in his tent on nights between long marches and bloody battles, they’re one of the foundational texts of Stoicism, an ancient philosophy that first emerged around 300 B.C., and which ...

All across the Universe, we can learn what stars are made of simply by taking a spectrum of the light coming from them. While some stars are low in what astronomers call metallicity — the fraction of elements that are heavier than hydrogen and helium — and others have high metallicities, the ratios of the heavy elements inside of them are normally fairly consistent. Oxygen is...

[In the early 1830s], a brash young printer named Benjamin Day launched a bold economic experiment: the one-cent Sun. A veteran of New York’s printer’s row, Day had spent several years working as a compositor at the New-York Evening Post, where he met fellow compositor Dave Ramsey, who dreamed of starting an affordable daily newspaper. At the time, the stand...

Human beings are transformed by parenthood, grief, war, love, technology, and new ways of thinking. But the experiences that reshape us most are also the hardest to measure, predict, or govern. Yale professor of philosophy L.A. Paul argues that the future demands curiosity, humility, and a better understanding of how change remakes the people living through it.

This ...

When JWST opened its eyes on the Universe, it glimpsed the Universe at farther distances, fainter magnitudes, and higher resolutions than ever before. One of the more profound surprises that emerged were a bright class of ultra-young, distant objects known as Little Red Dots. If all of the light from these objects were coming from their stars, they’d have to be ultra-massive ...