One of the most remarkable facts about the Universe is simply that, over the past couple of centuries, humanity has actually been able to make sense of much of it at a basic, fundamental level. We’ve determined what all of the luminous and light-blocking material, plus radiation, is made of: the normal matter and energy in our Universe that consists of particles within the Standard Model. We’ve discovered black holes and have come to understand how gravity and the expanding Universe works: governed by the laws of Einstein’s General Relativity. And we understand the rules governing how particles interact: through the strong nuclear, weak nuclear, and electromagnetic forces, as dictated by quantum field theory.

While these developments occurred both theoretically as well as observationally and experimentally, this picture has truly been cemented over the last 50 years by a large suite of data: collected from precise particle collider and detector experiments here on Earth, in space, as well as astrophysical and cosmological observations of the grand Universe. The Standard Model of particle physics, as well as the Standard Model of cosmology — rooted in quantum field theory and General Relativity — form the grand foundation of our modern scientific enterprise.

Many have devoted their lives to exploring extensions and alternatives to these standard scenarios, and are (unfortunately) often ridiculed as doing “useless” research. But this research, when done correctly, is anything but useless; it represents the most underappreciated achievements in theoretical physics over the past several decades. Here’s what we’ve learned, and why it’s so valuable.

On the right, the gauge bosons, which mediate the three fundamental quantum forces of our Universe, are illustrated. There is only one photon to mediate the electromagnetic force, there are three bosons mediating the weak force, and eight mediating the strong force. This suggests that the Standard Model is a combination of three groups: U(1), SU(2), and SU(3), whose interactions and particles combine to make up everything known in existence. Despite the success of this picture, many puzzles still remain.

When it comes to making sense of the Universe, it’s important to focus our attention on the big picture: the full suite of data and what it both does and doesn’t indicate. Whenever you have a scientific theory, model, or framework that you work within, one of the biggest challenges is to extract testable predictions from it: predictions that are quantitative (i.e., that answer the question of “how much” of an effect occurs), predictions that lead to potentially observable and/or measurable signals, and predictions that differ from the predictions of the other theories, models, or frameworks that are used to describe and predict reality.

We can immediately recognize, historically, that there are many such examples where this is exactly how science advanced. Some notable revolutions included:

• Kepler’s theory of elliptical orbits in a heliocentric framework, which matched the observed orbits of the planets, especially that of Mars, better than any other model, including the models of Ptolemy and Copernicus.
• Dirac’s theory of the relativistic electron, leading to the successful prediction of positrons (and other forms of antimatter), of the behavior of light and charged particles near the speed of light, the understanding of electron spin, and to an understanding of the fine structure of the hydrogen atom.
• And Einstein’s theory of gravitation — General Relativity — which successfully explained aspects of gravity (like Mercury’s perihelion precession) that Newton’s theory could not, and made several new predictions like the deflection of starlight that passed near a massive object (like the Sun during a solar eclipse) that agreed spectacularly with experiment and observation.

The results of Arthur Eddington’s 1919 expedition, which confirmed and validated the predictions of Einstein’s general relativity, while disagreeing significantly with the alternative (Newtonian) predictions, was the first observational confirmation of Einstein’s new theory of gravity. The amount that starlight was deflected by during a total solar eclipse was a key prediction that was unique to Einstein’s new theory.

These examples stick out as memorable in many ways for a simple but uncommon reason: because these theoretical developments, which can either be viewed as “alternatives to the then-accepted mainstream” thought of the time or as “extensions to what was generally known at the time,” turned out to lead to predictions that better agreed with our observable, measurable reality than the pre-existing frameworks that they eventually superseded. There were also hints that something was a bit “off” about our pre-existing theories, as:

• there were notable discrepancies between the orbits of the planets (especially the ones that we now know have the greatest eccentricities) as observed by Tycho Brahe as compared with the predictions of Ptolemy and Copernicus during the time of Kepler,
• there was a lack of agreement between the predictions of the Schrodinger equation under relativistic conditions and observations, and a lack of agreement between the observed fine-structure of the hydrogen atom and the predictions of the Bohr model of the atom in Dirac’s time,
• and there was an observed disagreement in Mercury’s orbit as compared with the predictions Newtonian gravity, while alternative explanations (like the existence of a hypothetical “Planet Vulcan” interior to Mercury) lacked direct observational support.

These already-apparent inconsistencies — or from a different perspective, a lack of a perfect agreement with the prevailing theory’s predictions — served as both motivations for the development of a novel, competing, alternative theory to the mainstream, but also served as an immediate sanity check: could the newly proposed theory explain what those longstanding theories couldn’t?

This diagram displays the structure of the Standard Model (in a way that displays the key relationships and patterns more completely, and less misleadingly, than in the more familiar image based on a 4×4 square of particles). In particular, this diagram depicts all of the particles in the Standard Model (including their letter names, masses, spins, handedness, charges, and interactions with the gauge bosons: i.e., with the strong and electroweak forces). It also depicts the role of the Higgs boson, and the structure of electroweak symmetry breaking, indicating how the Higgs vacuum expectation value breaks electroweak symmetry and how the properties of the remaining particles change as a consequence. Neutrino masses remain unexplained.

That’s very analogous to the situation we find ourselves in today, as we seek to understand the nature of reality to the most extreme degree possible. Sure, we have an incredibly successful model of reality right now: the best of all-time. We have a set of force laws that describe all of the interactions we can detect and measure, and a list of cosmic ingredients that describe the contents of our reality exquisitely. We have all sorts of predictions — from both General Relativity and quantum field theory — that are extraordinarily consistent with everything we’ve observed and measured.

And yet, there are all sorts of observed facts about the Universe that our current theories cannot and do not explain. Some of them could simply be, “that’s just how the Universe was born,” and we can foist these mysteries off onto “initial conditions” and ignore them. But there are a great many of them, and they sure are piling up the deeper we look. They include:

• the existence of dark matter,
• the existence of dark energy,
• the vastly disparate values of the fundamental constants, including the disparate strengths of the fundamental forces and the disparate masses of the known particles,
• the origin of neutrino masses and why there are only left-chiral neutrinos and right-chiral antineutrinos,
• the unexplained origin of the matter-antimatter asymmetry,
• the Hubble tension, or how different methods of measuring the expanding Universe yield different values,

and a whole lot more. These mysteries, and attempts to resolve them, have led to a great many proposed extensions to the Standard Model.

The rest masses of the fundamental particles in the Universe determine when and under what conditions they can be created, and also relate to how long they can survive after their creation during the hot Big Bang. The more massive a particle is, the less time it can spontaneously be created in the early Universe, and the shorter its lifetime will be. Although we can explain particle masses through a coupling to the Higgs, we have no way of successfully predicting their values; they must be experimentally measured in order to be determined.

Of course, none of them have cleared the three major hurdles that all proposed new theories must conquer if they are to supersede and replace the prevailing theory as part of our standard, consensus picture of reality. Those three hurdles are as follows.

1. The new theory must reproduce all of the (often prodigious) successes of the pre-existing, prevailing theory of the day. That means that every one of the changes or extensions that the new theory makes in comparison to the old theory must not conflict with any aspect of the full suite of data that already doesn’t conflict with the prevailing, leading theory that the alternative is seeking to replace.
2. The new theory must also — and this is often the very reason it was proposed — successfully explain at least one already-observed phenomenon or solve at least one still-unsolved problem that the old theory cannot successfully account for.
3. And then, assuming both of those earlier hurdles have been cleared, the next step is for the new theory to make novel, testable predictions that differ in some measurable, observable, and testable way from the predictions of the prevailing theory.

Only once all three of these hurdles have been cleared can a new theory be said to supplant, or supersede, the older, prevailing theory. That’s how the foundational picture of reality, often called our current “consensus” position, evolves over time.

If one wants to investigate the signals within the observable Universe for unambiguous evidence of super-horizon fluctuations, one needs to look at super-horizon scales at the TE cross-correlation spectrum of the CMB. With the final (2018) Planck data now in hand, the evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of their existence, validating an extraordinary prediction of inflation and flying in the face of a prediction that, without inflation, such fluctuations shouldn’t exist.

This is how the Big Bang came to be our leading picture of reality, and later, how cosmic inflation altered our view of the beginning of the Universe and changed how we viewed the Big Bang: not as the origin of our Universe, but rather as a hot, dense state that emerged in the aftermath of inflation’s end. This is how we came to accept the existence of dark energy, and how we came to model it successfully as a cosmological constant. It’s how we came to understand that our Universe is filled with a species of matter that neither absorbs nor emits light, and that doesn’t interact with normal matter in any directly detectable way except gravitationally: what we presently call dark matter.

It’s only by matching the existing observations and being consistent with the full suite of data that we already have, reproducing every one of the successes of the current theory, succeeding in at least one instance where the current framework does not succeed, and in making robust, testable predictions that differ from the currently accepted theory in a measurable way, that science truly advances.

In the realms of particle physics and cosmology, however, revolutionary successes are exceedingly rare. Far more common are attempts at replacing the existing theory that fail to be borne out by reality: an all-important endeavor that, unfortunately, is largely met with scorn among many influential physicists.

Quantum mechanics’ entangled pairs can be compared to a machine that throws out balls of opposite colors in opposite directions. When Bob catches a ball and sees that it is black, he immediately knows that Alice has caught a white one. In a theory that uses hidden variables, the balls had always contained hidden information about what color to show. However, quantum mechanics says that the balls were gray, or a combination of black and white, until someone looked at them, when one randomly turned white and the other black. Bell inequalities show that there are experiments that can differentiate between these cases. Such experiments have proven that quantum mechanics’ description is correct, and the balls have an indeterminate color until the measurement is made.

Such scorn is certainly ill-deserved, of course, as it’s the ability to put a novel, promising theory or idea to the test that is the hallmark of good theoretical science. Most people have an incorrect and even a harmful view of science, where it goes something like,

“The first person to stumble upon an idea that ultimately turns out to be correct, even if they wind up getting the right answer due to incorrect reasoning, is the person whose genius should be lauded.”

This thought, despite how common it is, is entirely wrongheaded. The hallmark of a good idea is an idea that:

• doesn’t conflict with already-existing data (because if it does, it’s dead-on-arrival),
• can explain at least one puzzle that the current theory doesn’t explain (because puzzles are there to be solved, and an idea that solves more puzzles has more predictive power),
• and can, in some novel way, be tested and measured against the old theory in a definitive fashion to determine whether the old theory, the new theory, or neither theory is correct.

Attempts to solve the puzzle of the matter-antimatter symmetry, for example, was one of the prime motivations for considering Grand Unified Theories as scenarios worth exploring: where it isn’t just the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces that unify at higher energies, but where the strong nuclear force also joins them at still-greater energies.

The particle content of the hypothetical grand unified group SU(5), which contains the entirety of the Standard Model plus additional particles. In particular, there are a series of (necessarily superheavy) bosons, labeled “X” in this diagram, that contain both properties of quarks and leptons, together, and would cause the proton to be fundamentally unstable. Their absence, and the proton’s observed stability, provide strong evidence against the validity of this theory in a scientific sense.

This was a great idea, not because it’s true, but because the idea could be tested. One consequence of grand unification is that — if it’s correct — it mandates the existence of new, super-heavy particles: particles that couple quarks to leptons in a way that goes beyond the normal Standard Model coupling. This enables baryon-number and lepton-number violating interactions, which is wonderful for clearing the second hurdle that a new theory must hurdle: it provides a potential explanation for a hitherto unexplained phenomenon: baryogenesis. However, the true test comes with the third step: a novel prediction that differs from the predictions of the old (Standard Model without grand unification) theory.

That prediction was simple, straightforward, and profound: the proton itself must be fundamentally unstable, with its lifetime dependent on the exact particle content and energy scale of the grand unification scenario under consideration. For example if the straightforward Georgi-Glashow SU(5) unification scenario were correct, the proton should decay with a mean lifetime of around 10³⁰ years.

At present, based on all of the large-scale detectors we’ve built with large amounts of liquid inside (including large numbers of protons), we have yet to observe proton decay, enabling us to set lower limits on the proton’s lifetime that are around a factor of 10,000 longer than that expected decay time; the proton’s lifetime is at least ~10³⁴ years. As a result, we can rule out the original Georgi-Glashow grand unification model, and can place meaningful constraints on other GUT scenarios as well.

Neutrino detectors, like the one used in the BOREXINO collaboration here, generally have an enormous tank that serves as the target for the experiment, where a neutrino interaction will produce fast-moving charged particles that can then be detected by the surrounding photomultiplier tubes at the ends. These experiments are all sensitive to proton decays as well, and the lack of observed proton decay in BOREXINO, SNOLAB, Kamiokande (and successors), and others have placed very tight constraints on proton decay, as well as very long lifetimes for the proton.

Many other ideas, similarly, can have measurable, testable predictions teased out of them. In electroweak-scale supersymmetry, for example, predictions include:

• the existence of flavor-changing neutral currents (which are forbidden in the Standard Model),
• the existence of a lightest supersymmetric particle that’s within reach of the LHC (which has not shown up),
• and the existence of a spectrum of Higgs bosons, including charged Higgs particles, rather than a single neutral Higgs (whereas the LHC has only revealed one).

This doesn’t eliminate supersymmetry from the realm of possibility just as the non-observation of proton decay doesn’t eliminate the possibility of grand unification but it does rule out and constrain a variety of supersymmetric scenarios.

Similarly, many alternatives to or extensions of General Relativity have been proposed, with some key observable differences including the existence of scalar and/or vector contributions to gravitational effects in addition to the standard tensor-only contributions put forth by Einstein, as in the case of Brans-Dicke gravity or TeVeS, or with a speed of gravity that differs from the speed of light, as in Gauss-Bonnet gravity. The testability of these theories and ideas is of paramount importance, as the observations of the kilonova event GW170817, which saw an electromagnetic signal and a gravitational wave signal arrive within 1.7 seconds of one another from 130-140 million light-years away, have either ruled out or severely constrained these alternatives to Einstein’s General Relativity.

Just hours after the gravitational wave and gamma-ray signals arrived, optical telescopes were able to hone in on the galaxy home to the merger, watching the site of the blast brighten and fade in practically real-time. This 2017 event allowed us to place tremendous constraints on alternative scenarios for both gravitation and electromagnetism, especially considering that the first light signals, in gamma-rays, arrived just 1.7 seconds after the gravitational wave signal completed, across a distance of some ~130,000,000 light-years.

It’s all too easy to point one’s finger at any number of theories (and theorists) and claim that they’re a waste of time, energy, and brain cells, and many do exactly that. But that’s completely unjustified. You can lambast people for clinging to an idea once it’s already been ruled out by the data, but to assert that the point of theoretical physics is to derive how the Universe is misses the point of what physics actually is at its core: an experimental science, not a theoretical endeavor. One of the most important things a theorist can do is to transform the general framework of a novel idea or extension into measurable, testable predictions that can be searched for experimentally or observationally: the science of phenomenology.

Why should a new discovery be guaranteed? Why should one or more favored or fashionable ideas be correct?

The truth is we don’t know until we look, and knowing what we should be looking for, as well as where to look and how to look for it, is an incredible part of the story. From LIGO to the LHC, from neutrino detection experiments to cosmic ray observatories, and from the Event Horizon Telescope to the JWST, we are living in a golden age of high-quality data, capable of testing alternative theories and possible extensions to the Standard Model as never before. Each step we take forward can help us determine not only how nature behaves, but how it doesn’t behave. That’s a tremendous success! Not everyone appreciates it, of course, but it’s probably the most important class of achievement — short of a revolutionary discovery that corroborates a novel theory — that occurs in fundamental physics today.

This article The most underappreciated achievement in theoretical physics is featured on Big Think.

Every major technological shift arrives with bold promises of efficiency and productivity. The current wave of artificial intelligence is no different. The forecasts are breathless: tasks automated, workloads reduced, insights unlocked, entire sectors transformed. But behind the promises sits a neglected question: what will work actually feel like?

Efficiency projections tell us nothing about the emotional reality of daily working life. And those emotional realities determine whether people collaborate, innovate, stay in their roles, or quietly disengage.

In an era dominated by AI hype, we need a different lens to understand the future of work. That lens is happiness — not as a perk or a soft ideal, but as a dynamic, measurable signal of how well work is working. AI will transform what we do at work. But only human leadership will determine how it feels to do it. Tracking happiness is the compass leaders need to guide that transition.

The hype is clear: The emotional reality is not

The dominant AI narrative is astonishingly one-dimensional. It focuses on speed, output, and efficiency. Organizations want to know what can be automated, streamlined, or redesigned. But the human experience of work doesn’t hinge on efficiency. It hinges on connection, fairness, autonomy, growth, and meaning. These emotional forces determine whether technology is experienced as liberating or oppressive.

History shows that technological revolutions rarely reduce the pace of work. Email sped up expectations. Smartphones dissolved boundaries between home and office. Collaboration tools multiplied communication channels. In theory, each innovation made things easier; in practice, work often became more intense.

AI could repeat this pattern — or radically improve it. The difference won’t be in the code. It will be in the culture into which AI is introduced. And that is why happiness matters.

Fear is legitimate — and dangerous if ignored

Many workers worry that AI threatens their jobs. These fears aren’t irrational. People sense the scale of change coming, and they know decisions are being made behind closed doors. Fear itself isn’t the problem. But fear left to its own devices is dangerous.

When people are frightened about the future of their roles, their nervous systems switch into threat mode. Threat mode triggers withdrawal: silence, disengagement, reluctance to take risks. That is the opposite of what organizations need during transformation. Creativity shrinks. Collaboration becomes cautious. Initiative declines.

The real danger isn’t AI — it’s secrecy. When AI is developed “behind the curtain” and then imposed on the workforce, people imagine the worst. And in the absence of clear information, imagination rarely paints a hopeful picture. People don’t need perfect reassurance. They need honesty. They need to feel part of the process, not passive recipients of decisions made elsewhere. When leaders treat AI as a social transition as much as a technical one, fear becomes something to work with rather than something that corrodes morale.

Fair and transparent processes create psychological safety — and without psychological safety, no amount of technology will produce good work.

Why happiness is the missing guide to AI adoption

Well-being has been a major organizational focus for years. It tells us whether people are coping; but it rarely tells us whether they are thriving. Happiness is different because when feel people good they do good work, they thrive.

More importantly, happiness is dynamic. It fluctuates week by week, responding to workload, relationships, fairness, and progress. These fluctuations are signals, not noise. They give leaders clear, real-time insight into whether teams feel energized or overwhelmed, hopeful or anxious, supported or alone. This is exactly the kind of frontline feedback leaders need during rapid technological change.

AI will reshape roles and expectations faster than organizations can plan for. Long-term roadmaps will quickly become outdated. Leaders need something more agile — a live emotional dashboard showing how people are experiencing the transition as it unfolds.

Tracking happiness gives leaders that insight. It shows whether AI is reducing friction or creating new frustrations; whether it is freeing time or intensifying workloads; whether people feel empowered or marginalized. Understanding happiness this way it becomes less of a destination and more of a compass — guiding the next step, not the entire journey.

AI can intensify work or liberate it: Leaders choose which

AI itself is neutral. It can speed up work or create space, remove bottlenecks or create new ones, empower people or make them feel monitored. The outcome depends entirely on how leaders implement it. Used well, AI eliminates repetitive tasks, reduces friction, and frees people to focus on creativity, collaboration, and meaning. It opens space for reflection and helps teams spend more time doing what humans do best.

Used poorly, AI becomes a mechanism for intensification. If organizations treat it purely as a tool for extracting more output from fewer people, work becomes more frantic. Expectations rise. Boundaries blur. People feel they are under surveillance rather than supported, and the emotional climate deteriorates.

The crucial question is not what AI can do, but how leaders choose to introduce it. No strategy will succeed if it ignores the emotional experience of work — because a strained emotional climate quietly resists change, while a healthy one helps it take root.

Measure–Meet–Repeat: Happiness as organizational agility

We are entering a future too unpredictable for rigid plans. AI is evolving faster than any previous workplace technology. No leader can reliably predict what their organization will look like in five years. Traditional change-management models — plan, design, cascade — are simply too slow. What leaders need is not an algorithm, but a heuristic: a way of taking the next right step under uncertainty. This is where happiness becomes a mechanism for agility.

A simple weekly rhythm — measure how people feel, meet to discuss what’s working or isn’t, repeat the cycle — creates an adaptive culture. Leaders stay attuned to emotional reality. Teams have a voice. Problems surface early, before they escalate. Small adjustments compound into resilience.

In many ways, Measure–Meet–Repeat mirrors agile methodology. It replaces rigid multi-year plans with iterative adaptation. It helps organizations learn, flex, and evolve as AI reshapes workflows and expectations. Happiness becomes the emotional equivalent of a quick sprint review: a fast, honest pulse of what’s happening on the ground.

In a world where the future is uncertain and the pace is accelerating, happiness is not a luxury. It is a navigation tool.

Why happiness may need to move from “guide” to “core principle”

Most organizations should see happiness as an essential guide during AI adoption. But the more forward-thinking ones will place happiness closer to the centre — because the rewards are even greater. Companies that embed happiness into their AI strategy will not only create better cultures; they will attract better talent. AI specialists, creative thinkers, and the next generation of workers are unlikely to accept burnout cultures or 60-hour weeks. They want flexibility, trust, meaning, and balance. They want to contribute value without sacrificing their health or identity.

In other words, they want good work. Organizations that use AI to create better work — not just more efficient work — will thrive both culturally and technologically. They will retain talent, generate innovation, and future-proof themselves against the rising expectations of Gen Z and beyond. When happiness becomes part of how work is designed, not just how it is measured, the benefits compound: stronger teams, greater creativity, and more sustainable high performance. Happiness is not a distraction from high performance. It is the engine of it.

A brief note on inequality

There is a wider concern: AI may increase inequality. Because AI requires significant capital investment, the gains may disproportionately flow to those who already hold power and resources. This could deepen economic divides and strain social cohesion.

Fairness is foundational to happiness. At work and across society, inequality erodes trust and security. If organizations want AI to create sustainable value, they must consider not only efficiency but also equity. This is not a political argument — it is an emotional and organizational truth.

The future of work may be artificial. But the quality of work will be profoundly human

AI is coming. It will transform roles, reshape industries, and redefine the boundaries of work. But it will not decide whether work becomes better or worse. That responsibility lies with leaders — human leaders — who must understand not just tasks and processes, but people and emotions.

Tracking happiness offers the clearest window into how people are experiencing change. It shows whether fear is being managed or magnified. It reveals whether AI is empowering people or overwhelming them. It helps leaders see whether work is becoming more fulfilling or more frantic. AI will shape the future of work. But only human emotional intelligence will determine whether that future is good. And happiness is the compass that can guide us there.

This article Measure–Meet–Repeat: Why tracking happiness is crucial to AI at work is featured on Big Think.

I’ve known a great many leaders in my time. Bosses, CEOs, heads, provosts, managers, politicians, coaches, supervisors, managing directors — whatever you call them, I’ve met my fair share of them. Some, I’ve known intimately. They are my friends, family, and close colleagues. Others I’ve watched from afar. Because it’s important to watch the leaders in our lives. According to Aristotle, it’s the only way we will learn.

In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle argues that to be a good person doesn’t mean doing one or two good things but developing certain virtues that allow you to do good things. Doing a brave thing doesn’t make you courageous. Giving a compliment doesn’t make you kind. To be good is to practice — over and over again — until you transform your character. A good leader is no different.

To develop the character traits of a good leader, you must consciously work on yourself. Treat your choices as bricks and, over time, those bricks will form something wondrous. The question then becomes, how do I know what bricks to lay? What must I do each day to evolve as a leader? To Aristotle, the best and easiest way to seed and nurture a virtue is to imitate those who embody it. Find a moral exemplar, a role model, or what the Greeks called a “phronimos.”

So, I watch the leaders in my life. I see what a boss does or does not do. I take note of what works for this colleague and is an utter failure for another. Everyone in my life is a potted lesson in how to become better. And in my recent conversation on the How to Make a Leader podcast with Hannah Beaver, I shared what I’d learned over many years of philosophical observation.

Here are three virtues I believe are essential to being a good leader.  

Fairness: Treat everyone with a straight bat

Many years ago, I had a boss who wasn’t always well-liked by everybody. I tend to get on with most people, but even I have to admit this was not an especially approachable, affable boss, willing to shoot the breeze. But that didn’t matter, because everyone respected him. People would roll their eyes and laugh, but no one really said a bad word about him. And the reason he was respected was that he enforced the rules the same for everybody. As I told Hannah, “Whether you were new or old, whether you’d been there for years or whether you had just joined the company, it didn’t matter. Here are the rules, and this is what I’m going to do.”

When it was time to leave that job, I asked to renegotiate an element of my contract. I knew it was a long shot, but don’t ask, don’t get. He said no. He was very reasonable and very straightforward about it, but he told me that this was the same rule for everyone, and no special pleading or careful argument could persuade him otherwise. Since then, I’ve come to see fairness — “playing a straight bat,” as the Brits say — is an indispensable virtue for any leader.  

Diligence: Roll your sleeves up and work hard

If you are going to be a leader, you must work hard. This is how I worded it in our interview:

“If you’re a leader, you often get paid more. And I should say, actually, not everybody has to become a leader. But if you do want to become a leader, I think you have to accept that with more money comes more work. I think you have to be willing to roll up your sleeves and to muck in. I have had a few bad leaders in the past who you felt as if they were delegating too much. Now, obviously, you should delegate as a leader or as a manager, but there have been times when I felt as though the leaders weren’t actually doing much work themselves.”

I should caveat what my past self has said. While I think it is true that some managers in my past have crossed the border from “delegation” into “laziness,” it’s also true that, sometimes, the frontline grunts simply just don’t see what leaders are doing. They don’t see the blocked-out calendars, the long and tiring admin, or the hard job of hiring and firing. But that needn’t take away from the general point: If you’re going to take on more power, responsibility, and a greater salary, I think you should expect to do that much more or harder work.  

The Gandalf Effect

I think fairness and diligence are fairly uncontroversial. I’m sure you’ve read 100 learning and development articles about how to give your best work or sat through a seminar or two about how to (legally and morally) be as fair as possible. But the third virtue that I think all leaders should embody and model is something that we possibly don’t consider as much these days: optimism. A good leader needs to inspire, rouse, and motivate everyone else. They need to give the kind of fiery hope that brought out my inner geek:

“So I’m a massive Lord of the Rings fan. I’m sure that doesn’t surprise you. I grew up on a diet of Middle-earth and Tolkien. But, in the deep law of The Lord of the Rings — it’s in The Silmarillion, actually — there’s the idea of the ‘rings of power.’ And Gandalf has a ring of power.

All of these rings have different powers. Some give you long life, some give you wealth, some can heal people, and some make you powerful or give you strength. But the ring that Gandalf has is hope. And so, Gandalf gives a kind of inner fire to people because of this ring. And I think that’s really important.

The reason why it’s one of the most powerful rings in Tolkien’s work is because Tolkien knew that if you haven’t got hope, then you won’t work hard. Whereas if you have hope, you will work hard. And so, I think that optimism needs to come from the leadership. And I think that does trickle down into the company. And if you don’t have that, I don’t think you should be a leader, really.”

The Gandalf Effect is when a leader embodies the kind of inspirational fire of an ancient wizard. Of course, a leader can think, say, and do whatever they think is best for the company behind closed doors. But in all their interactions with most of the company, they need to lift people up. They need to bring people along. Gandalf did not throw the One Ring into Mount Doom. Gandalf did not singlehandedly defend Helm’s Deep. Gandalf did not lead the armies of men. But he was the engine that drove it all. A good boss needs to be that engine. A good leader needs to be a White Wizard.

To listen to the full conversation, explore the How to Make a Leader podcast episode with Jonny.

This article The Gandalf Effect: The most important thing for any leader is featured on Big Think.

From 2022 onward, JWST began revolutionizing our cosmic perspective.

This side-by-side view shows the same object, the Pillars of Creation, as captured by JWST in both mid-infrared light (at left) and in near-infrared light (at right). Note the different features revealed as far as stars, dust, gas, and other features within the nebula. Different wavelengths are sensitive to different types of features, including for features beyond the limits of JWST.

Its spectacular early results broke records and inspired awe.

This almost-perfectly-aligned image composite shows the first JWST deep field’s view of the core of cluster SMACS 0723 and contrasts it with the older Hubble view. The JWST image of galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 is the first full-color, multiwavelength science image taken by the JWST. It was, for a time, the deepest image ever taken of the ultra-distant Universe, with 87 ultra-distant galaxy candidates identified within it. Most are still awaiting spectroscopic follow-up and confirmation to determine how distant they truly are.

However, these 10 recent JWST images surpassed even our imaginations.

The quadruply gravitationally-lensed quasar RX J1131-1231 is located roughly 6 billion light-years away, with a single foreground galaxy serving as the gravitational lens. Combined with X-ray emissions, we learn that the central black hole spins at approximately half the speed of light.

10.) The best quadruply-lensed quasar.

This zoomed-in view of the quadruply-lensed quasar RX J1131-1231 showcases variations in brightness and magnification of the background object enhanced by the gravitational lens. The clustering of three of the images, with a fainter image on the opposite side, showcases the imperfect alignment between the observer, the lens, and the background source.

Four independent images join an Einstein ring.

This extremely young star cluster began forming stars only within the last 3 million years, making it one of the youngest star clusters known in existence. The orange color, to JWST’s eyes, represents gas that glows with heat in the infrared, powered by outflows from young, massive Herbig-Haro objects.

9.) Herbig-Haro stars in star-forming NGC 1333.

This nebula in the Perseus molecular cloud, NGC 1333, is located only 960 light-years away here in our own Milky Way. While Hubble can only capture the light-blocking dust and heated gaseous material, JWST is spectacular at viewing an enormous number of obscured stars and cooler material that is invisible to Hubble.

JWST sees newborn stars, brown dwarfs, and planets, surpassing Hubble’s hazy views.

The open star cluster Westerlund 1 was only discovered in 1961, and is one of the only super star clusters known within the Milky Way. Located 12,000 light-years away, it has the greatest density of massive, young stars found anywhere within the Milky Way itself.

8.) Newborn stars in Westerlund 1.

This close-up of the stars in Westerlund 1 showcases JWST’s resolution and sensitivity to cool, obscured stars. The wispy red material represents dusty material surrounding the star cluster that hasn’t been fully boiled or evaporated away, while the cluster itself contains between 50,000 and 100,000 solar masses worth of material.

A foreground interstellar cloud can’t hide this super star cluster.

The spiral galaxy NGC 2566, located approximately 76 million light-years away, is one of 55 relatively nearby galaxies studied as part of a JWST program to understand the relationship between stars, gas, and dust in galaxies that are actively forming new stars. Many wispy structures are seen in red, highlighting the presence of dust, while blue colors highlight the presence of stars. In green and yellow, background galaxies galore can also be spotted.

7.) Spiral galaxy NGC 2566’s gas-rich structures.

This spectacular Hubble view of galaxy NGC 2566 may be more familiar than the JWST view of the same object, showcasing a central bar and dust lane, followed by a circular concentration of newborn stars glowing in blue with pink ionized regions highlighting the presence of heated hydrogen. Nevertheless, many features, like the dust distribution, cannot be seen by Hubble; they require JWST’s longer-wavelength, infrared sensitivities.

While Hubble excels at imaging stars, JWST reveals cold gas, warm dust, and more.

What appears to be a swirling lake of light around a central core is actually two separate objects: a foreground elliptical galaxy with a distant lensed spiral galaxy wrapped around it. The ultra-distant spiral galaxy, due to the lensing magnification effects of the foreground mass, can have its individual internal structures revealed, including individual star clusters and galactic features that would be too faint and distant to be revealed without the presence of the lens.

6.) An incredible wraparound lens of a spiral galaxy.

This zoomed-in view of the most severely lensed features of the background spiral galaxy reveals individual bright, blue spots within the background galaxy, corresponding to star clusters that have never been otherwise resolved, except with JWST and gravitational lensing combined.

Within SMACS J0028.2-7537, a heavily lensed spiral’s star clusters appear from across the cosmos.

This ultra-deep view of massive galaxy cluster Abell S1063 was acquired with an impressive 120 hours of JWST observing time across 9 different near-infrared wavelengths of light. The colors represent relative wavelengths, with the reddest objects highlighting the most distant background galaxies lensed by the massive foreground cluster. The same background galaxies appear multiple times in the same image: a consequence of strong gravitational lensing.

5.) Monster galaxy cluster Abell S1063.

The galaxy cluster Abell S1063 was also observed by Hubble, in addition to JWST. Whereas Hubble can reveal some of the lensing features that JWST sees, most are invisible: a consequence of Hubble’s inferior size and wavelength sensitivity, requiring more observing time for a lower-resolution view that cannot see the reddest or most redshifted objects that JWST can reveal.

Perhaps the most spectacular gravitational lens ever, JWST’s views far surpass Hubble’s.

This planet-forming protoplanetary disk, IRAS 04302+2247, is one of the closest examples of a protostar with a protoplanetary disk to Earth: just 525 light-years away. JWST reveals a streak of dusty gas that represents a protoplanetary disk, while the bipolar ejects shows protostellar material being blown away perpendicular to the disk. There is likely a combination of inflows and outflows occurring here, making it difficult to know how massive the star at the center will ultimately become.

4.) Planet-forming disk IRAS 04302+2247.

This close-up view of the central portion of the protoplanetary system IRAS 04302+2247 showcases the motion of gaseous material away from the central protostar, while accreting material from within the disk is particularly dust-rich, obscuring even JWST’s views of the central protostar. Dense objects, such as at the bottom of the protoplanetary disk, are actually background galaxies: visible even in these complex environments due to JWST’s unique sensitivity.

Violent winds drive material away from the central, edge-on protoplanetary disk.

Aside from the Magellanic Clouds found here in the Local Group, these two dwarf galaxies, NGC 4490 and NGC 4485, are the closest pair of actively star-forming, interacting dwarf galaxies known to exist: at a distance of 24 million light-years away. The bridge of gas, dust, and stars connecting the two galaxies has never been revealed in the level of detail that JWST sees, while the internal stellar populations point to two recent episodes of star-formation: one 200 million years ago and then a more recent one 30 million years ago.

3.) Twin dwarf galaxies NGC 4490 and NGC 4485.

A total of 10 separate Hubble observations, acquired between 2005 and 2015, were used to construct this image of nearby interacting dwarf galaxy NGC 4485, with its companion NGC 4490 located off-screen. The new stars and star clusters are visible here, but the gas and dust, and the bridge connecting it to its companion galaxy, are not revealed by Hubble’s views.

These nearby interacting dwarfs possess gaseous and stellar bridges that Hubble couldn’t reveal.

How are bipolar planetary nebulae, like the Red Spider Nebula shown here, shaped by the outflows and jets that emerge from the dying Sun-like star and any stellar companions found at the core of these regions? That’s what a joint Chandra-JWST observing program was designed to reveal, with JWST providing imagery of the turbulent shapes that the blown-off material creates, far surpassing the extent and detail of earlier Hubble images.

2.) The Red Spider Nebula.

The two-lobed, bipolar planetary nebula known as the Red Spider Nebula was revealed by Hubble way back in 2001, showcasing big waves in the planetary nebula’s ejecta. However, with JWST, we can see many additional turbulent features, and also find that these lobes extend for much farther and persist at much lower temperatures than Hubble’s deep observations reveal.

JWST spots a dying Sun-like star’s extended turbulent oscillations, which Hubble misses.

This glowing region, filled with wispy gas, dark red dust, and brilliant blue and white stars, lies inside the nebulous star cluster Westerlund 2, located 20,000 light-years away in the constellation of Carina, toward the galactic center. With JWST, it isn’t only the bright stars that dominate, but cooler ones, brown dwarfs, and even planetary mass objects as small as the mass of several Jupiters. The infrared glow of that material, visible to JWST’s NIRCam and/or MIRI instruments, enables the detection of fainter, cooler objects than ever before.

1.) Dwarf stars in newborn Westerlund 2.

Released back in 2015, this spectacular Hubble image of Westerlund 2 was released to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope. The star cluster is visible at the upper right, while the surrounding nebulous dust and gas represents the site of continuing, ongoing star-formation. JWST can not only reveal what happens inside those still-star-forming clouds, but can find fainter, cooler, stellar and sub-stellar objects within the cluster than Hubble can ever hope to see.

JWST reveals cooler, fainter, redder stars than Hubble ever could.

This animation shows the Hubble image (left) and JWST image (right) of the same region of the Lobster Nebula, NGC 6357, with the focus of the image being the stars of the cluster Pismis 24. The Hubble image is overlaid atop the JWST image to show the same features as seen in different wavelengths of light, with JWST revealing far more stars, gas, and dust across a wider variety of temperatures and emission features.

Mostly Mute Monday tells an astronomical story in images, visuals, and no more than 200 words.

This article 10 JWST images that reveal the Universe as never before is featured on Big Think.

In any given week, you will probably talk to dozens or hundreds of people. Most of these conversations will probably be about perfunctory, practical matters: “Two tickets, please,” “No, after you,” or “Darling, do you know where Liam’s swimming trunks are?” At other times, these conversations swish gently, as with two friends chatting over coffee, or they might ramble in a debate about who’s better: the Reds or the Blues. But according to Oprah Winfrey, everyone in every conversation mostly wants the same thing.

Winfrey has interviewed tens of thousands of people over her incredible 30-year career. She’s interviewed Michael Jackson, Barack Obama, and Meghan Markle, as well as a group of neo-Nazis and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (two groups who may or may not overlap). Winfrey recalls that the moment the camera stops running, and the production crew whisks off the mics, guests will invariably ask the same thing: “How did I do?”  

The need for validation

Of course, you are not the president of the United States. You are not a prince across the water. You are not a neo-Nazi Turtle. And so, while you might not explicitly ask your friend, “How did I do?” after a meetup or a night out, you will probably think it. As far back as we can see, humans have been seeking status, recognition, and validation from others. Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that this all began the moment we went from hunter-gatherer individuals to living in houses and communities. When we were in this pre-social condition, we cared only for doing and for living. The second we sat opposite someone around a campfire, we looked at them. Worse, we felt them looking back. And so, public perception became anxiety number one.

This imagined pre-social world is fairly unscientific and unhistorical; at best, it’s unprovable. But in his recent book, The Crisis of Narration, the Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han argues that there has been a different shift in recent years. Han argues that humans have long been “storytelling” creatures. We present an account of our lives and usually try to include all the slow, deep structures of the story. Yes, we wanted to be liked and accepted, but the emphasis was still mostly on the fact that “this is who I am, accept me or don’t.”

When he was alive, I remember my grandfather telling me great stories about his life. Of course, with the earned privilege of age, he didn’t give a rip for what we grandkids thought of him. But he would lay out the details of his life in stark and often shocking authenticity. This was his life, this was who he was, and this is why he did it. I’m sure he still cared that we loved and respected him, but my grandfather told great stories, and I always felt I knew him better for it.

Recently, though, Han argues that we have moved from storytelling to storyselling. Now, we invent or exaggerate our stories in such a way that they will be accepted or liked. We twist who we are to fit into the group we are with. We say we believe this or that we’ve done that, knowing full well that others will say, “Oh yeah, great.” Of course, this is unhappy. This constructed mask of faux-authenticity suffocates us. But it’s also comically absurd. An entire room of people can be storyselling fabricated narratives while underneath the groupthink and nodding assent, everyone thinks it’s nonsense.  

The Oprah Rule

Whether you agree with Han or Rousseau, the point is much the same: Everyone wants to be validated and accepted. And so, if we want to make someone feel better about who they are — if we want to cultivate closer, intimate relationships — we should use the “Oprah Rule.”

The Oprah Rule involves two parts. First, we intentionally present our interlocutor with opportunities to be validated. We ask questions like, “How did that feel when it happened?”, “What were you thinking when they said that?”, or “I’d love to hear about why that was so important to you.” Second, make sure to provide all the explicit validation they are seeking; say, “I can understand that,” “I can see why you thought that,” and “I think you did great.”

The Oprah Rule is built upon a more fundamental philosophical and empathetic foundation: We need to meet people where they are. As Han put it, we should treat “listening as a healing act” and stop buying people’s stories but accepting them, instead. Step inside someone’s shoes, see the world with their eyes, and invite them to express themselves. Invite someone to tell their story and not to invent or sell it. And as you do so, listen well and accept the gift and vulnerability they offer you.

This article The Oprah Rule: What everyone wants you to say in a conversation   is featured on Big Think.

One of the most amazing properties of gravity in the context of Einstein’s general relativity is that mass, wherever it’s concentrated, is capable of curving the very fabric of space. This leads to a number of vital effects:

• other nearby objects, from gas to galaxies, get attracted to and drawn into those massive clumps,
• all particles in motion, including massless particles, get gravitationally attracted to that region when they pass by it,
• and the light from background objects gets deflected, bent, magnified, and distorted by that curved space as it passes through it.

That last effect is known as gravitational lensing, and it plays many important roles on cosmological scales.

You might think, then, that a large, massive clump of matter — one that behaves as a gravitational lens — would commonly bend the light from background objects into a geometrically perfect shape: a ring. In fact, that very shape was theorized by Einstein himself, and is known as an Einstein ring. But Einstein rings are exceedingly rare and are usually imperfect when they appear, instead a four-image configuration known as an Einstein cross is far more common.

But why? That’s a question I’ve been asked many times, including most recently by our Patreon supporter Michael, who simply provided a link to this gorgeous Einstein cross and asked,

“Why [do we see] four distinct images, and not six, or twenty-seven? Wouldn’t a ring be the default situation?”

In theory, yes, you would expect Einstein rings to be more common, and Einstein crosses to be more rare. But in practice, it’s the other way around. Here’s the science as to why.

This object isn’t a single ring galaxy, but rather two galaxies at very different distances from one another: a nearby red galaxy and a more distant blue galaxy that’s gravitationally lensed by the foreground galaxy’s mass. These objects are simply along the same line of sight, with the background galaxy’s light gravitationally distorted, stretched, and magnified by the foreground galaxy. The result is a near-perfect ring, which would be known as an Einstein ring if it made a full 360 degree circle. While lensing is more commonly seen from galaxy clusters, individual galaxies can do it if they’re compact enough and if the alignment is right.

In the image above, you can see what looks like a horseshoe-shaped blue galaxy, wrapped around a yellowish galaxy at the horseshoe’s center. It would be very easy to, on a visual inspection alone, mistake this for a very rare but fascinating type of object known as a ring galaxy, which usually has a central nucleus filled with old, red-colored stars and a ring-like halo of young, blue-colored stars surrounding it.

But ring galaxies are very different from Einstein rings (or, as you see above, near-Einstein rings). In the case of a ring galaxy, as you can see below, we’re looking at a single galaxy that’s experienced the aftermath of a collision, where a typically smaller, fast-moving galaxy has “punched through” the center of a gas-rich galaxy. That interaction causes the gas from the center to ripple outward, where it crashes into gas-and-dust in the outskirts of the galaxy, leading to a peak in the density of normal matter in a ring — sometimes a circular ring, sometimes an ellipsoidal ring — outside of the central concentration of stars.

The inner region then becomes depleted of gas and dust, leaving only the older, pre-existing population of stars behind, while creating new stars in the ring configuration that surrounds the central core. That ring will appear bluer compared to the redder core, leading to a relatively rare ring galaxy, where both the ring and the core of the galaxy are located at the same distance and possess the same redshift as one another.

This X-ray/optical composite image shows the ring galaxy AM 0644-741 along with a wide-field view of its surroundings. Below and to the left of this ring galaxy is a gas-poor ellipsoidal galaxy that may have punched through the ringed galaxy a few hundred million years earlier. The subsequent formation and evolution of a ring of new stars would be expected from the propagation of gas away from the center, like ripples in a pond.

On the other hand, in the case of a gravitational lens, the configuration is vastly different, even if their optical appearances are relatively similar. In the case of a gravitational lens, what happens instead is that:

• There is an object that appears at the center, which is a massive foreground object like a galaxy, quasar, or a dense cluster or group of galaxies.
• Then, there’s at least one (and possibly more than one) luminous background object that’s aligned perfectly, or nearly perfectly, with the line-of-sight connecting our telescope’s eyes with the foreground object.
• The mass of the foreground object, which curves the fabric of spacetime itself, then causes the background light source to have the light from it behave as though it were shone through a lens, where the light can get bent, distorted, magnified, and stretched either into multiple images or into arcs.
• And in the most perfect of cases, where the geometry of the lens and the alignment of the lens, the background light source, and the observing telescope is ideal, you won’t get multiple images or arcs, but rather a perfect ring-shaped appearance to the lensed background source.

That’s the configuration that results in a gravitational lens, with the telltale difference, observationally, coming from the more-distant redshift of the ring-like structure as compared with the foreground structure that’s causing the lensing to occur.

This wide-field view, centered on the most distant gravitational lens ever discovered, shows a larger area of the COSMOS-Web field. The Einstein ring is clear evidence of a gravitational lens. While the foreground object is quite far away, at around 17 billion light-years distant, the lensed background object that’s stretched into a ring is still farther: at approximately 21 billion light-years away.

Einstein rings, importantly, do exist, and a fascinating array of them have been found among the millions upon millions of galaxies we’ve looked at both deeply and at high resolution. In particular, both Hubble and JWST have been prolific at finding them, as these two space telescopes represent the highest-resolution views of the Universe we’ve been able to regularly obtain from up above Earth’s atmosphere, with Hubble specializing in visible light wavelengths and JWST specializing in infrared wavelengths.

Below, you can see two highlights of our studies of systems that exhibit this strong gravitational lensing effect, with the top image acquired by Hubble and the bottom image constructed from JWST data.

• At top, you can see the lensed system known as SDSS J0946+1006 (because it was initially spotted by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, before being followed-up by Hubble), and was imaged in visible light by Hubble back in 2008. It represents the first “double Einstein ring,” where a gravitational lens is creating near-rings from two independent background objects that happen to be aligned along the same line of sight: one several billion light-years farther away than the other.
• Then, at bottom, you can see the results of a relatively nearby foreground galaxy, just 3 billion light-years away, that’s gravitationally lensing a system that’s rich in complex, carbon-rich dust that’s located an impressive 12 billion light-years away: the most distant detection of organic molecules at the time of its discovery in 2023.

This composite image shows the Hubble view of the first double Einstein ring ever discovered, where two near-perfect background sources at different distances each make a near-complete Einstein ring, while at bottom a detection of carbon-rich, organic dust 12 billion light-years away was enabled by the serendipitous alignment of a foreground lens located just 3 billion light-years away, spotted by JWST.

So it turns out that Einstein rings are real; they do exist, and although they’re rare, they aren’t the same as “ring galaxies” at all, but are rather a purely gravitational-induced optical phenomenon.

However, Einstein rings aren’t the most common type of configuration that we see when it comes to gravitational lenses at all. In fact, a far more common one in strong lensing is a quadruply-imaged background source known as an Einstein cross. In this case, with respect to the foreground lens, you don’t wind up with a ring-like configuration at all, but rather with four separate images, roughly located along the four cardinal directions (north, south, east, west) with respect to the lens itself, that all show the same background source.

Below, for example, you can see the Einstein cross that the question-asker referred to: the original and first such Einstein cross ever found, also known as Huchra’s lens or G2237+0305. There is a faint foreground galaxy causing the lensing, and that galaxy’s central nucleus can be seen as the “stem” of the four-leaf-clover shaped background lens that gets bent into a cross. The four images are not identical, even though they’re the same object. Instead, their positions and brightnesses vary slightly from one image to the next, and if a transient event were to occur within them, it would go off at slightly different times in each image due to the gravitational time-delay induced by the lens itself.

The original Einstein cross, also known as Huchra’s Lens or, more formally, as G2237+0305. The four images surrounding what appears to be the central core of a very faint galaxy are in fact the same background object, a quasar, that is gravitationally lensed into four separate images by the foreground mass that’s doing the gravitational lensing.

You might think that this quadruple lens is a rarity, and indeed such objects are not exactly common. However, the Einstein cross configuration is actually far more common than the ideal shape of an Einstein ring, and many such examples abound. There’s the Einstein cross known as UZC J224030.2+032131, for example, imaged by Hubble in 2012. In 2017, a newly discovered Einstein cross known as HE0435-1223 was discovered: one of the best Einstein crosses ever found.

Back in 2020, a dedicated astronomical search for these Einstein crosses was conducted, hoping to use these very sensitive systems as probes of strong gravitational lensing; eight new Einstein crosses were identified, leading to some of the most precise measurements of dark matter substructure within a foreground lens. As we’ve expanded to large-area surveys, like Gaia, a suite of a dozen different Einstein crosses were found: all new discoveries in the data, as released in 2021.

Although these Einstein crosses vary tremendously in brightness, orientation, and time-delays between the various images, they show that this cross-shaped pattern is actually rather common: significantly more common than the Einstein ring configuration that you might default to in your mind. And while it might not be obvious, it turns out that there’s a profound underlying reason behind why this is the case.

This image highlights six of the eight quadruply lensed systems first used to place the greatest model-independent constraints on dark matter’s temperature and mass from structure formation. These images have also revealed the presence and distribution of dark matter substructure within the foreground lens system for each such system that was investigated: one of the most powerful probes of dark matter on small scales.

So why is this the case? What is the reason behind the fact that crosses are more common than rings when it comes to gravitational lensing? And why, as a corollary, are most of the crosses asymmetric instead of being in a perfect corners-of-a-square configuration, while most of the rings we observe are only partial rings, rather than complete rings?

It turns out there are two primary reasons that explain all of these questions. If you want to get an Einstein ring, it’s very important that you have a set of particular symmetries to the system.

1. For the lens itself, you want the lens to either behave as though it were point-like, where 100% of the mass can be well-approximated as being located at a single point, or you want the lens to be in a spherically-symmetric configuration, where all directions and locations away from it will experience the same gravitational potential, the same gravitational gradient, and the same amount of gravitational lensing and magnification. If your lens is ellipsoidal, if your lens has significant amounts of substructure within it, or if your lens has a preferred axis to it, you won’t be able to get a ring.
2. And for the background source, you really need a perfect alignment of the location of that source with the line connecting you, the observer, to the foreground lens system that’s doing the gravitational lensing. As you can see in the illustration of gravitational microlensing, below (a related phenomenon), there’s only one configuration that creates a ring: where there’s a perfect alignment of the background source with the line-of-sight connecting you, the observer, with the massive object acting as the foreground lens itself.

When a gravitational microlensing event occurs, the background light from a star gets distorted and magnified as an intervening mass travels across or near the line-of-sight to the star. The effect of the intervening gravity bends the space between the light and our eyes, creating a specific signal that reveals the mass and speed of the object in question. Only in the event of a perfect alignment of the observer, the foreground mass, and the background light source is a ring temporarily created: the same as an Einstein ring under an ideal, general gravitational lensing configuration.

These two properties are not only not universal, but rather each individual one is rare. Unless you’re far enough away from a dense, compact object, you’re unlikely to have spherical symmetry to your system at all. Instead, you’re far more likely to be viewing a system that:

• has substructure to it, including from the normal, baryonic matter that’s highly asymmetric and embedded within a larger dark matter halo,
• has multiple mass clumps within it, including among the gas and dust, as well as among the stellar content of the matter inside,
• and that can possess multiple components to it: satellite galaxies, more than one galaxy, populations of globular clusters, high-velocity gas clouds, black holes, and more.

In addition, the idea that you’ll have a perfect alignment between the source, the lens, and the observer is also an exceedingly rare proposition. Even misalignments of a tiny fraction of a degree will result in the impossibility of a ring. When you combine both of those effects together, of a non-spherical or non-point-like mass source for the lens, plus the lack of a perfect alignment between not just two objects but three (or more) of them, you wind up finding that cross-like configurations can still occur frequently, but ring-like configurations will almost never happen.

Rather than a ring-like configuration, most realistic gravitational lens systems with excellent alignments between the source, the lens, and the observer wind up producing cross-like configurations. This is due to two main factors: imperfect alignments between the source, lens, and the observer, and also from the substructure of both dark matter and normal matter that leads to significant departures from perfectly spherical symmetry to the lens system.

The cases where you see near-rings or partial rings, like large, circular sections of arcs, result from the configurations where you do indeed have point-like or spherically symmetric lenses, but the alignment between the source, the lens, and the observer remains imperfect. The cases where you see four images of an Einstein cross in a perfect configuration, where you have the four images appear as though they were the four corners of an invisible square, correspond to the case of a perfect alignment between the source, lens, and observer, but where the lens itself is not spherically symmetric and/or is not point-like in its nature.

But the most common such configuration where you do have four images is where both things are imperfect: where the alignment between the source, lens, and observer is imperfect, and also where the lens itself does not exhibit spherical symmetry but rather has some clumpiness and/or ellipticity to it. The ellipticity generally makes the four points appear more rectangular or parallelogram-like than square, while the misalignment makes the four points appear skewed, where they cluster more toward one corner than another. This is not a problem with the theory; it is merely a consequence of the geometric configurations that the Universe provides us with.

These 12 Einstein crosses were all newly discovered in the Gaia data and released in 2021. While some of them represent near-perfect alignments between the source, observer, and lens, some of them exhibit very asymmetric crosses, which is evidence for a less perfect alignment. In all cases, the lens itself must be aspherical, otherwise rings-and-arcs would be the shape, rather than cross-like multiple images.

Of course, other configurations are very much possible, particularly when you have either:

• more complex lensing sources, enabling for the existence of different numbers (and potentially greater numbers) of potential light-paths that the light can follow between the source and the observer,
• or more imperfect geometries, which usually serve to reduce the number of images that can arise, down to three or two, or in extremely poor alignment cases, all the way down to one, where the only effects that are visible are distortions and magnifications, not multiple images.

There can be background objects that appear five times or more, for example, whereas the first example of gravitational lensing resulting in multiple images of a background object was merely a doubly lensed-quasar, also known as a twin quasar. At the present moment, six images of the same object remains the current record, but more complex lens systems can theoretically result in even more; perhaps the new JWST survey, such as the COSMOS-Web or the VENUS survey, even though it isn’t the main goal of either survey, will uncover one with even more images in it. However, rings are very likely to still remain rare, and the reason is twofold: real lenses aren’t usually spheres, and background objects are extremely unlikely to appear exactly along the same line-of-sight that connects the observer to the lens. For those reasons, we have Einstein crosses galore, but only rarely do we see an Einstein ring!

Send in your Ask Ethan questions to startswithabang at gmail dot com!

This article Ask Ethan: Why do gravitational lenses make crosses, not rings? is featured on Big Think.

Most of us measure age by birthdays, but what if the number on your ID tells only half the story? 

Dr. Morgan Levine explores the hidden clock inside our cells, unraveling how the biological age that reveals how fast our bodies are really aging is calculated.

This video The biggest myth about aging, according to science is featured on Big Think.

Consciousness feels like the most familiar thing in the world, and yet science still can’t say what it is, where it begins, or why it exists at all.

Annaka Harris examines the assumptions shaping consciousness research, from the belief that awareness requires complex brains to the intuition that thought drives behavior.

This video The hard problem of consciousness, in 53 minutes is featured on Big Think.

The literary world is no safe haven from wild conspiracy theories. It has its own supposed cover-ups, extraterrestrials, and cryptids lurking in the bookish backwoods. These conspiracy theories aren’t typically harmful and can even offer some fun lore to draw you into the reading. Like all conspiracy theories, though, they distort our understanding of reality and history, and they can sometimes extend beyond the page to have far-reaching consequences.

A rose by any other name

Perhaps the most common literary conspiracies involve questions of authorship: the belief that a writer didn’t actually create the works credited to them. And it’s understandable why readers sometimes doubt the authenticity of the name on the cover.

For one, many authors use pseudonyms. Mary Ann Evans adopted the pen name “George Eliot” because she believed male novelists were taken more seriously; Stephen King became “Richard Bachman” because he was too prolific for the standard publishing cycle; and Benjamin Franklin pretended to be the dowager “Silence Dogood” to prank his brother James. 

For another, some attributions are more a matter of convention than provable reality. Scholars can’t say with certainty that Homer existed, and even if he did, it remains an open question how much of The Iliad and The Odyssey can be attributed to him or the oral tradition that followed. Similar questions can be raised about the Chinese philosophers Lao Tzu and Sun Tzu. (No relation. Tzu is an honorific roughly translating to “master.”)

These facts leave plenty of space for wild speculation, even about modern authors with well-documented lives. Rumors claim that Thomas Pynchon is a pseudonym for the reclusive J.D. Salinger, or that Truman Capote wrote To Kill a Mockingbird while using his childhood friend Harper Lee as an authorial front. Both claims are false.

But without question, the most sweeping conspiracies over authorship surround none other than the Bard himself.

“There is an extraordinary — seemingly an insatiable — urge on the part of quite a number of people to believe that the plays of William Shakespeare were written by someone other than William Shakespeare,” the journalist and author Bill Bryson writes in his book on the playwright. “The number of published books suggesting — or more often insisting — as much is estimated now to be well over five thousand.”

Doubts over Shakespeare’s authorship gained traction in the mid-19th century with Delia Bacon. Like many before and after, Delia praised Shakespeare’s plays for their insights and rich language, but this adoration led her to believe that such artistry could not have been achieved by a man of such modest beginnings. She reasoned that the plays must have been written by an educated, world-traveled elite who then credited them to a lowly actor and theater manager — likely to distance himself from their true, subversive intent.

To prove her theory, Delia sailed to England, but instead of sifting through archives or reading primary sources like a historian, she combed the plays for “hidden meanings” and sought inspiration by “absorbing [the] atmospheres” of notable sites. Vibes scholarship, basically.

She came to believe that Shakespeare’s plays were written by Francis Bacon — again, no relation — with the help of a cadre of co-conspirators, including the poet Edmund Spenser and Sir Walter Raleigh. While Delia enjoyed fleeting support from literary figures such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, her unsubstantiated claims were largely ridiculed.

That didn’t stop others from advancing their own anti-Stratfordian theories. Suspects have included James I, William Stanley, Anne Hathaway, Edward de Vere, and Christopher Marlowe — never mind that the last two died years before all of Shakespeare’s plays were finished.

The inconvenience for all of these lay theories is the same that plagued Delia’s guesswork: They lack truly credible evidence. Meanwhile, scholars and historians have uncovered ample evidence to vouch for Shakespeare’s claim to the quill, including official court records that attribute specific plays to him.

Bryson sums it up nicely: “These people must have been incredibly gifted — to create, in their spare time, the greatest literature ever produced in English, in a voice patently not their own, in a manner so cunning that they fooled virtually everyone during their own lifetimes and for four hundred years afterward.”

Going down a killer rabbit hole

While some conspiracy theories deny that certain authors lived the writerly life, others insist they led a double life in the shadows. No, we’re not talking about a pedestrian affair or unpopular political affiliation. These conjectures aim to add chapters of secret identities and deadly rendezvous to an author’s biography.

Again, it’s understandable as some authors have, in fact, led double lives. To research his first novel, Harlan Ellison went undercover as a member of a street gang. George Orwell was outed as an informant for the Foreign Office’s covert propaganda unit, providing the department with a list of potential communists he called his “fellow-travellers.” And during World War II, children’s author Roald Dahl engaged in espionage while serving as a diplomat to the U.S.

Christopher Marlowe may also have been recruited into the spy game by Sir Francis Walsingham around 1585. Scholars can’t say for certain one way or the other — unless you’re Dahl, spying typically works that way — but the idea did inspire a well-reviewed mystery, “A Tip for the Hangman.”

But the wildest double life attributed to an author belongs to Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. You may know him better as Lewis Carroll or, in the case of this conspiracy theory, Jack the Ripper.

Despite leaving a bloody trail of carnage throughout London’s Whitechapel district in 1888 and taunting authorities with letters full of bravado, Jack the Ripper has never been identified. A lineup of doctors, lawyers, butchers, and criminals has been floated as culprits, but who better to throw off the police than a former deacon who excelled at the sciences, entertained children, and worked as a university lecturer?

That must have been what Richard Wallace thought when he accused Carroll and Thomas Vere Bayne of being the true Whitechapel murderers in his books The Agony of Lewis Carroll (1990) and Jack the Ripper, Light-Hearted Friend (1996). 

Wallace’s theory hinges on the author’s love of riddles and wordplay. According to it, Carroll hid confessions of his foul deeds inside his work as anagrams. For instance, Wallace claims that the famous opening lines of Carroll’s poem “The Jabberwocky” conceal a sneaky confession. Here’s Carroll’s poem:

“’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves / Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: / All mimsy were the borogoves, / And the mome raths outgrabe.”

And here’s Wallace’s decrypted version: 

“Bet I beat my glands til, With hand-sword I slay the evil gender. A slimey theme; borrow gloves, And masturbate the hog more!”

If you think that’s a stretch, so did Karoline Leach, author of In the Shadow of the Dreamchild (1999). The book aims to dispel the many myths surrounding Carroll, and in it, Leach analyzes Wallace’s theory. She concludes that Carroll perpetrating such messy wordplay is more unbelievable than the idea of him moonlighting as a Victorian Dexter. She specifically notes that in one instance, Wallace had to substitute letters to make his anagrams work at all. 

Leach went on to demonstrate the ridiculousness of Wallace’s evidence by applying his methodology to the opening line of A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh. Here’s Milne:

“Here is Edward Bear coming downstairs now.”

And here’s Leach’s “decryption”:

“Stab red red women! CR is downing whores AA.” (“CR” obviously being a deranged Christopher Robin.)

Wallace’s theories fall apart without the anagrams, as well. In the Retrospect Journal, Kayla Greer points out that physical evidence of Carroll and Vere Bayne’s involvement is nonexistent, and Carroll was only in the right part of London for a few of the murders.

“By Wallace’s methodology,” Greer adds, “one could equally ‘prove’ that Charles Dickens, Alfred Tennyson, or any prolific Victorian author was Jack the Ripper.”

A cold case (and nothing more?)

When a death is sudden, unexpected, and high-profile, it opens the doors to conspiratorial thinking. And literary history has plenty of mysterious deaths for theorists to choose from.

Some speculate that Albert Camus’s death in a car accident in 1960 was no accident, but a KGB hit in response to his criticisms of the Soviet government. Geoffrey Chaucer died of unknown causes in 1400, but that lack of evidence hasn’t stopped people from suspecting murder by order of King Henry IV. And Christopher Marlowe pops up again to secure the conspiracy hat trick. Marlowe was stabbed to death during a bar fight over a game of backgammon, but some claim the brawl covered up an assassination aimed at silencing him and protecting high members of the government. (Remember, he might have been a spy.) Others say it was faked to help him escape his enemies.

Meanwhile, Edgar Allan Poe’s death was not unlike something you’d find in one of his stories. On October 3, 1849,  Poe was found in a gutter near a tavern after having been missing for five days. He was delirious and wearing someone else’s haggard clothes. After four incoherent days in the hospital, where he called out for a “Reynolds” who was never identified, he died at the age of 40.

Adding to the mystery, Poe’s death certificate and none of his medical records still exist. We only know that the attending physician, John Moran, said the cause of death was phrenitis (swelling of the brain). This generic diagnosis and the mysterious circumstances have led to many conjectures over the true cause. These have included rabies, substance abuse, carbon monoxide poisoning, heavy metal poisoning, a brain tumor, and murder.

The assumption that Poe died due to his love of the bottle has since been proven unlikely. While Poe had a reputation as a substance abuser who often became belligerent, this popular opinion was largely shaped by a slanderous obituary in the New York Tribune. Its writer, Rufus Wilmot Griswold, held a grudge against Poe and, despite becoming Poe’s literary executor, slandered the author’s name for years after his death.

It didn’t help that Joseph E. Snodgrass, an editor with medical training who helped with Poe after he was found, was a member of the temperance movement and used Poe as a strawman during lectures to highlight the dangers of drinking.

In actuality, Poe swore off alcohol after overcoming an illness and being told by his doctor that another drink would likely kill him. While it isn’t unheard of for an alcoholic to fall off the wagon, samples of Poe’s hair were tested in 2006 and showed low levels of lead (back in the day, the toxic metal made its way into wines and other alcoholic beverages as a sweetener or through contact with leaded glassware). While Poe’s hair showed levels many times higher than what is normal today, the results suggest he wasn’t drinking heavily toward the end of his life.

A hoax of meager genius 

Books can also exude a fog of mystery, and literary hoaxes are penned to take advantage of this fact. While such hoaxes alone don’t often reach the heights of a full-blown conspiracy theory — more on that below — they can nonetheless misguide readers into accepting them as evidence of deep-state deception. 

Examples include The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses, which claim to be lost books of the Hebrew Bible containing magical incantations, but which first appeared in anonymous pamphlets in the 1800s. A century later, the West German magazine Stern purchased what its editors believed were 60 volumes of Adolf Hitler’s personal diaries; they were actually forgeries created by the conman Konrad Kujau. 

Yet one of the oddest literary hoaxes in recent memory has to be the Simon Necronomicon. Odd because it’s no secret that the Necronomicon is made-up. The author H.P. Lovecraft devised the book as a plot device in his famous Cthulhu Mythos. In these horror stories, this magic tome is said to contain the history of the Old Ones — powerful, often evil cosmic beings — as well as unspeakable, arcane knowledge. 

Lovecraft wrote his stories with an eye toward verisimilitude, and those featuring the Necronomicon are no different. He composed a centuries-long history for the book, even including a list of the academic institutions said to house extant copies. He would also reference it alongside “real” grimoires and alchemical texts, such as The Book of Dzyan (circa 1900) and Turba Philosophorum (circa 900).

His efforts were convincing enough that some readers came to believe the book actually existed. Libraries known for their collections of ancient manuscripts, including the Vatican Library, have received information requests for it, and after Lovecraft’s death, books sporting the name began appearing in occult bookstores. Many of these are obvious and playful homages to Lovecraft’s work, but others claim to be the real deal. The Simon Necronomicon stands with the latter.

Originally published in 1977, this Necronomicon is attributed simply to a “Simon,” though the actual author is likely the occultist Peter Levenda. In the introduction, Simon claims to have been given a Greek translation of a real Necronomicon by a mysterious monk and later verified its curses, incantations, and spells to predate most known religions.

But according to Gabriel McKee, librarian for collections and services at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University, the book is actually “a mishmash of recontextualized Sumerian and Babylonian texts peppered with added references to fictional deities created by Lovecraft and the orientalist magical system of Aleister Crowley.” The translations aren’t even original. Simon plagiarized them from academic sources, throwing in a handful of Cthulhus and Yog-Sothoths for good measure.

“The Simon Necronomicon reads its ancient sources through a combination of medieval demonology, 19th-century Theosophy, and 20th-century pulp fiction,” McKee writes.

The book didn’t gain much traction beyond occult enthusiasts and edgy teenager cliques, but it did attract some popular attention during the trial of Rod Ferrell. In 1996, Ferrell and a group of friends murdered the parents of Heather Wendorf and then stole the family’s Ford Explorer. When the police apprehended the teens, they found copies of the Simon Necronomicon and The Witches’ Bible in the car.

Testimony at the trial revealed that Ferrell believed he was a vampire and his friends had formed a small cultish group named the “Vampire Clan.” His elaborate fantasy world, likely a mental escape from his otherwise harsh life, was constructed from extensive reading of not only occult works but also ancient prophetic and apocalyptic literature.

“The general public knows just enough about the history of the ancient Near East for it to view it as a place of mystery and strangeness,” McKee writes. “We actually know quite a lot about ancient Near Eastern cultures and their religious practices […], but historical fabrications expect and depend on ignorance. The more we learn, and the better we communicate that knowledge, the more tools we will have for opposing misconstructed history.”

A hoax with an unrivaled toll

While hoaxes and literary conspiracies can be provocative, they seldom have consequences more far-reaching than filling online listicles or breaking awkward silences at parties. But much like inspiring a vampire cult, they can sometimes motivate violent action. The Turner Diaries — a novel depicting an apocalyptic race war that has gained a reputation as the “bible of the racist right” — inspired Timothy McVeigh’s 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building.

Hoaxes and lay theories can also be actively weaponized to inspire violent action and conspiratorial worldviews. Hate propaganda can manipulate emotions, twist facts, and propagate outright lies, and as far as this use of writing goes, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion has to take the cake. It’s a bloody, disgusting cake, but it takes it.

The Protocols is a fake document purporting to be the minutes of a meeting of Jewish leaders. During this fictitious meeting, members plan how they will take over the world and bring down Christianity. (Hot tip: Don’t take down the minutes of your global criminal conspiracies. The paper trail always comes back on you.) 

While the origin of The Protocols is unknown, a Czarist official in Moscow named Sergei Nilus was one of the first to publish the hoax in 1905. He edited and released several versions afterward, each time adding a new account of how he happened upon it. 

Since its initial dissemination, the document has been used to “prove” that a group of Jewish elites is conspiring for world domination. For instance, after the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the Bolshevik Party’s rise to power, it was used to explain how “International Jewry” was to blame for communism, hence the term “Judeo-Bolshevism.” In fact, one reason there are so many variations of The Protocols is that they were adopted and adapted over the years by different antisemitic groups and narratives — each time being tweaked to fit that particular group’s grievances.

The Protocols spread like wildfire during the first half of the 20th century, circulating worldwide and inspiring other books and hateful rhetoric. The role it played in the rise of the Nazi Party and Hitler’s own writing is well-documented. Henry Ford’s antisemitic volumes, The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem (1920), were based on and included elements from it.

For more than 100 years, The Protocols has been used as a way to scapegoat, slander, and justify the murder of Jews, all despite being disproven as early as the 1920s. In his book The Myth of the Jewish Menace in World Affairs (1921), British diplomat and journalist Lucien Wolf debunked the hate propaganda, even noting how parts of The Protocols were plagiarized from a German novel in which the literal devil supports the Jews.

In the preface to his book, Wolf calls out his fellow Englishmen for spreading such disinformation: 

“I confess to a feeling of shame at having to write this pamphlet at all. That reputable newspapers in this country should be seeking to transplant here the seeds of Prussian anti-Semitism, and that they should employ for this purpose devices so questionable and a literature so melodramatically silly, cannot but cause a sense of humiliation to any self-respecting Englishman.”

Like Delia Bacon’s unwillingness to accept the simple answer that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare’s plays, adherents of The Protocols allow their pre-existing biases to shape their worldview. Rather than letting the evidence influence their belief, the belief bends and distorts reality to a point where all evidence must fit within it or be discarded. Unlike Bacon’s story, however, The Protocols show that literary conspiracy theories aren’t guaranteed to remain on the fringe.

This article 5 literary conspiracy theories — debunked is featured on Big Think.

One of my growing concerns about artificial intelligence is that it increasingly abstracts away the need for mentorship inside organizations. When young people get hired today, it’s becoming easier for managers to spend less time teaching and more time just handing over tools. In the short run, that can look like efficiency. But I do worry about what gets lost over the long run — especially for people just starting their careers.

That’s part of what made this wide-ranging conversation between author and interviewer William Green and Nima Shayegh so enjoyable. I was especially struck by Nima’s reflections on his years of training under Lou Simpson — one of the most respected long-term investors of the past half-century. Like all great mentors, Simpson taught through osmosis: long conversations, careful questions, shared reading, and repetition over many years.

Listening to Nima — now running his own investment firm — talk about that experience was a good reminder that mastery is rarely a solo act. Even with better tools, it still comes from having someone walk alongside you, over time.

Key quote: “There were no Bloomberg terminals. There was no financial TV on. It was like the library of a scholar — a comfortable chair, a couple piles of reading material, and this just very calm presence. He looked at me as he led me inside and he said, ‘Make yourself at home. Let me make you a coffee.’ … And I remember thinking to myself, ‘I should be making you the coffee.’ And when he returned, he didn’t launch into some kind of monologue. He didn’t try to assert how smart he was. He would ask these questions with this very sincere curiosity. And it was this remarkable receptiveness for someone with his experience and with his reputation.”

The all-important context we’re missing

I enjoyed Morgan Housel’s recent essay, “A Few Things I’m Pretty Sure About.” As usual, it’s wide-ranging and reflective.

But what stayed with me most was a simple idea: how much context we’re missing when we judge people — and the world — in real time.

Housel opens with a reflection on chronic pain, then widens the lens. Most harm, he argues, is unintentional. Behavior almost always makes sense once you understand the system surrounding it; the problem is that we rarely have that information while we’re living inside the moment. That perspective carries through his thoughts on housing, AI, and politics.

“When times are good, people get complacent and stop caring about good governance,” he writes. “When times are bad they get fed up and say, ‘Enough of this.’ And I think we’re not far from that today.”

Key quote: “I have a theory about nostalgia: It happens because the best survival strategy in an uncertain world is to overworry. When you look back, you forget about all the things you worried about that never came true. So life appears better in the past because in hindsight there wasn’t as much to worry about as you were actually worrying about at the time.

A few more links I enjoyed:

What the Hell is Water? – Christopher Tsai

Key quote: “‍The idea that much of what we experience in life goes undetected connects deeply to an issue that I’ve been pondering a lot lately: investors’ rigidity — or myopia — in judging companies’ valuations and assessing business durability. In the context of investing, the water in which we swim includes all of the ingrained assumptions, mental shortcuts, and dogmas that many investors accept, often without questioning… This danger is particularly evident when considering the origins of enduring business success, an area where unexamined assumptions tend to blind investors to the subtle forces at play.”

The most successful information technology in history is the one we barely notice – via Big Think

Key quote: “It may seem obvious that books are a technology, yet we rarely think about how they work. They just do. Read most any list of history’s important inventions, and you’re unlikely to find the humble book. The printing press will absolutely be present, possibly taking the top spot. You may even spy paper in the running. While such innovations helped create the modern book — and we’ll discuss them soon — they are also distinct from the book as a technology in and of itself. So, if books were so transformative, why don’t we think about them the same way we do microchips, microwaves, and the steam engine?”

This article How to be a great mentor in business and life is featured on Big Think.