45 thinkers, books, and ideas connected to this field.
Hungarian-British novelist and essayist who wrote Darkness at Noon — the most powerful fictional account of Stalinist show trials — and subsequently wrote widely on creativity, science, and the paranormal.
American founding father, printer, diplomat, scientist, and inventor — who negotiated the French alliance that won American independence, invented bifocals and the lightning rod, founded the University of Pennsylvania and the first public library, and wrote one of the greatest autobiographies in English.
Carl Sagan's posthumous 1997 essay collection — on science, technology, environmental concerns, and the meaning of human existence — including his final essay written while dying of cancer.
James Nestor's 2020 book on breathing science — arguing that chronic mouth breathing causes health and structural problems, that nasal breathing has documented health benefits, and that ancient breathing practices (pranayama, Sufi breathing) have a rigorous scientific basis.
Scientist referenced in the MISC1 context, associated with chemistry or biochemistry research.
American science journalist and author — author of 1491 (on pre-Columbian Americas), 1493 (on the Columbian Exchange), and The Wizard and the Prophet (on Norman Borlaug and William Vogt) — who writes the best popular science and history for general audiences.
Long-form intellectual interview podcast hosted by Dwarkesh Patel — covering AI, science, history, and economics through 2–4 hour deep-dive conversations with guests including Jensen Huang, Dario Amodei, Ilya Sutskever, Satya Nadella, Andrej Karpathy, Terence Tao, and many others.
American philosopher at NYU who works on the philosophy of science, complexity theory, and Jungian psychology — particularly the relationship between complexity science and archetypal theory — contributing to the dialogue between analytical psychology and contemporary science.
English philosopher and statesman — Lord Chancellor — author of Novum Organum and The Advancement of Learning — who created the inductive scientific method and argued that knowledge gives power over nature — the philosophical architect of the Scientific Revolution.
Google's AI research division — formed from the 2023 merger of Google Brain and DeepMind — responsible for AlphaGo, AlphaFold, Gemini, and foundational deep learning research.
American author and music industry publicist turned science writer — author of The Lucifer Principle (1995) and Global Brain (2000) — who developed theories of group selection, meme evolution, and the social nature of biology.
BBC Radio 4 weekly radio programme hosted by Melvyn Bragg — in which Bragg and three academic experts discuss a topic from history, philosophy, science, or culture — one of the longest-running and most intellectually serious programs in British broadcasting.
Alexandra Horowitz's 2009 account of dog cognition and sensory experience — explaining what dogs smell, see, and understand based on comparative cognition research — the most widely read popular account of the science of dogs.
American author and journalist — author of Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art — who synthesized research on breathing mechanics and ancient breathing practices in a book that created a mass interest in nasal breathing and breathwork.
German writer who wrote Faust, The Sorrows of Young Werther, Elective Affinities, and the Bildungsroman Wilhelm Meister — also conducting botanical and color theory research — considered the greatest figure of German literature and the last universal genius of Western civilization.
Florentine Renaissance artist and polymath — painter of the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, sculptor, architect, musician, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, botanist — the paradigmatic example of the Renaissance man and perhaps the most curious person in history.
Lex Fridman's long-form interview podcast — covering AI, science, philosophy, history, and culture — with guests including Elon Musk, Vladimir Putin, and leading scientists — one of the most downloaded podcasts globally.
United States government space agency founded in 1958 — which landed humans on the Moon, launched the Space Shuttle, built the International Space Station, and launched the Voyager probes — and which has been both SpaceX's primary customer and the institutional model SpaceX was built to outcompete on cost.
The methodological principle attributed to William of Ockham: do not multiply entities beyond necessity — the simpler explanation, all else being equal, is to be preferred.
Peter Attia's 2023 longevity medicine guide — arguing that medicine should focus on delaying the four chronic disease 'Horsemen' (cardiovascular, cancer, metabolic, neurodegenerative) through exercise, sleep, nutrition, and emotional health — the most rigorous popular longevity book.
Robert Wood's 1905 foundational textbook on physical optics — which established the modern experimental basis for the science of light — and which reflected Wood's lifetime of extraordinary experimental optical physics work.
French philosopher and mathematician — author of Discourse on the Method and Meditations on First Philosophy — who created analytical geometry, the mind-body problem, and Cartesian doubt — whose cogito ergo sum is the most famous philosophical claim.
Rice University in Houston Texas — a small private research university known for its science and engineering programs but also housing Jeff Kripal's J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought — the institutional home of Kripal's work on mysticism and parapsychology.
English friar and philosopher — who argued for empirical observation and experimentation in natural philosophy centuries before Francis Bacon — made contributions to optics, calendar reform, and the theory of lenses — sometimes called the first scientist.
Charles Duhigg's 2024 investigation of extraordinary communicators — arguing that the key to communication is matching conversation type (practical, emotional, or social) and that anyone can learn supercommunicator skills.
Alison Wood Brooks's 2024 guide to better conversation — synthesizing conversation science research into practical frameworks for asking better questions, managing topics, and navigating difficult conversations.
David Deutsch's 2011 philosophical argument — that the beginning of Infinity is the discovery of good explanations (hard to vary, testable), that all human progress comes from this discovery, and that there are no fundamental limits to what can be understood or achieved.
Lex Fridman's long-form interview podcast featuring scientists, engineers, philosophers, athletes, and public figures in conversations typically running 3–8 hours.
William Egginton's 2023 book interweaving the thought of Kant, Borges, and Heisenberg — arguing that all three reached the same conclusion from different directions: that reality as we experience it is always a construction mediated by our cognitive and physical limitations, never the thing itself.
A three-volume work by Hermann von Helmholtz (1856–1867) that systematically analyzed the physiology and psychology of human visual perception.
Randall Munroe's 2014 book — answering absurd hypothetical science questions (What if everyone on Earth jumped at once? What if a baseball traveled at 90% of the speed of light?) with rigorous scientific calculation — the most entertaining science education book.
Matthew Walker's 2017 book on sleep science — arguing that insufficient sleep causes cancer, cardiovascular disease, mental illness, and obesity — the book that made sleep a mainstream health priority but which has been criticized by sleep researchers for overstating evidence.
Philosophical and scientific concept — describing the phenomenon whereby higher-level properties, patterns, or behaviors arise from lower-level interactions in ways that cannot be predicted or reduced to those lower-level components — one of the most important concepts in contemporary philosophy of mind, biology, and complexity science.
Ananyo Bhattacharya's biography of John von Neumann — the polymath whose contributions to quantum mechanics, game theory, computing, and nuclear weapons design make him perhaps the most consequential scientist of the 20th century.
Philosophical metaphysical position — holding that only matter (or physical processes) ultimately exists — that mind, consciousness, and all mental phenomena are either identical to, reducible to, or fully explicable by physical (brain) processes — the dominant metaphysical assumption of modern science and analytic philosophy.
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization — a UN specialized agency promoting international cooperation in education, science, and culture, with influence over global education standards and curriculum frameworks.
Dwarkesh Patel's long-form interview podcast — featuring extended conversations with intellectuals, scientists, historians, and thinkers. (Note: same as 'The Dwarkesh Podcast,' later renamed.)
American journalist and author of 1491 and 1493 — landmark popular histories that transformed understanding of pre-Columbian Americas and the Columbian Exchange.
Agricultural scientist who developed high-yield dwarf wheat varieties, sparking the Green Revolution — credited with saving more than a billion people from starvation.
Charles Murray's inventory of human achievement in the arts and sciences — using historiometric methods to identify the most significant contributors across history and examine what conditions produced them.
Dutch draper and self-taught scientist who, using handmade microscopes of unprecedented power, became the first person to observe bacteria, protozoa, and the microscopic world — founding the science of microbiology.
Anonymous Substack newsletter known for rigorous, heterodox long-form research posts — most notably the obesity/food reward/chemical hypothesis series.
English architect and scientist who rebuilt London after the Great Fire (1666) — designing 52 churches including St Paul's Cathedral — and was one of the founding members of the Royal Society.
The DarkHorse Podcast is hosted by evolutionary biologists Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, covering evolutionary biology, cultural criticism, COVID-19 controversies, and heterodox perspectives on science and society. It became prominent after the Evergreen State controversy and grew significantly during COVID for challenging mainstream pandemic narratives.
Springer (now Springer Nature) is one of the world's largest academic publishers, founded in Berlin in 1842 and now publishing over 3,000 journals and 200,000 book titles across science, technology, medicine, and the humanities. It merged with Nature Publishing Group to form Springer Nature in 2015.