ToK Essays Nov 2024

Despite the constant stream of bad news we see in the media, the reality is that living standards have improved dramatically across time.

Research shows it’s the freedom to exercise curiosity that, through history, has underpinned new learning, critical thinking and reasoning and has contributed to significant social and scientific progress

Infinite sums are among the most underrated yet powerful concepts in mathematics, capable of linking concepts across math’s vast web.

Every era has its myths and rituals, doomed to seem absurd to future generations. Today, we believe in psychology.

The attack on Salman Rushdie promptly led to speculation on whether the attacker had been influenced by the 1989 fatwa against the author. A scholar explains what a fatwa is, and isn’t.

The eccentric logician Kurt Gödel revolutionized the study of mathematics with his famous incompleteness theorem, but the most compelling implications of his hypothesis might be in what it means for the study of the mind and consciousness.

When Randy Schiefer was hospitalized with COVID-19, he wasn't sure he would survive. Now, he looks back at that experience as the most important thing that has ever happened to him.

It’s not logical to believe your relationship is “meant to be.” But believing in destined love may have evolved as a way to keep couples together long enough to reproduce and raise children.

Infinite sums are among the most underrated yet powerful concepts in mathematics, capable of linking concepts across math’s vast web.

Using ideas borrowed from graph theory, two mathematicians have shown that extremely complex surfaces are easy to traverse.

Siddhartha Mukherjee sings the praises of the cell to offer us a holistic portrait of life.

Physicists are using quantum math to understand what happens when black holes collide. In a surprise, they’ve shown that a single particle can describe a collision’s entire gravitational wave.

If intelligence analysis is to improve, we must learn from our new understanding of cognitive bias.

Progress got derailed somewhere between indoor plumbing and the flying car. Why?

In computer simulations of possible universes, researchers have discovered that a neural network can infer the amount of matter in a whole universe by studying just one of its galaxies.

Words are not violence. Violence is violence.

For 50 years, mathematicians have believed that the total number of real numbers is unknowable. A new proof suggests otherwise.

A cheery mood, you might think, is a terribly self-absorbed response to serious times. But history tells us otherwise

Mathematicians have long grappled with the reality that some problems just don’t have solutions.

Around 1987, Sagan gave an uncannily prescient lecture to the Illinois state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.