The International Big History Association (IBHA) exists to promote the unified and interdisciplinary study and teaching of the history of the cosmos, Earth, life, and humanity.
resources
Organizations
IRAS is a non-denominational, independent society with three purposes: 1) to promote creative efforts leading to the formulation, in the light of contemporary knowledge, of effective doctrines and practices for human welfare; 2) to formulate dynamic and positive relationships between the concepts developed by science and the goals and hopes of humanity expressed through religion; 3) to state human values and contemporary knowledge in such universal and valid terms that they may be understood by all peoples, whatever their cultural background and experience, and provide a basis for world-wide cooperation.
The Zygon Center is located at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago and is dedicated to relating religious traditions and the best scientific knowledge in order to gain insight into the origins, nature, and destiny of humans and their environment. The purpose of the center is to bring together scientists, theologians, and other scholars to discuss and carry out research on basic questions and issues of human concern.
The project aims to make big history broadly available in classrooms and online—reaching anyone curious about how it all fits together.
The Pierre Auger Observatory in Malargue, Argentina, is a multinational collaboration of physicists trying to detect powerful cosmic rays from outer space.
The mission of the Center for the Story of the Universe is to assist people in making the transition from modernist forms of consciousness to the emerging forms resonant with an ecological civilization. Through the production and distribution of DVDs, the Center for the Story of the Universe provides educational processes for exploring and embodying the new cosmological understanding of the universe, earth and human.
FQXi catalyzes, supports, and disseminates research on questions at the foundations of physics and cosmology, particularly new frontiers and innovative ideas integral to a deep understanding of reality, but unlikely to be supported by conventional funding sources.
The Long Now Foundation was established in 1996 to creatively foster long-term thinking and responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.
Eric Chaisson's multimedia website houses educational materials related to cosmic evolution - the study of the many varied changes in the assembly and composition of energy, matter and life in the thinning and cooling of the Universe.
NASA Images was created through a partnership between NASA and the Internet Archive, a non-profit digital library based in San Francisco, to bring public access to NASA's image, video, and audio collections in a single, searchable resource.
The site contains everything from classic photos to educational programming and HD video, and is growing all the time as it continues to gain both new and archived media from all of NASA's centers. The development of nasaimages.org is aimed at promoting education and facilitating scholarship in the math and sciences at all levels, and building general interest and excitement around space exploration, aeronautics, and astronomy.
Books
WHC is free worldwide. It is published by the University of Illinois Press, and its institutional home is Hawaii Pacific University. WHC is published the first week in October, February, and June.
Joel Primack, one of the world's leading cosmologists, and Nancy Ellen Abrams, a cultural philosopher and writer, use recent advances in astronomy, physics, and cosmology to frame an exciting new way to understand the universe as a whole and our role in it. The book's website includes useful graphics and video clips.
Zygon is dedicated to the manifold interactions between the sciences and human religious and moral convictions.
Eric Chaisson addresses some of the most basic issues we can contemplate: the origin of matter and the origin of life, and the ways matter, life, and radiation interact and change with time.
This is the website for The View from the Center of the Universe: Discovering our Extraordinary Place in the Cosmos, a widely praised 2006 book by Joel Primack and Nancy Ellen Abrams. In this groundbreaking book, Primack, one of the world's leading cosmologists, and Abrams, a cultural philosopher and writer, use recent advances in astronomy, physics, and cosmology to frame an exciting new way to understand the universe as a whole and our role in it. For a video introduction to the book, click here.
Films
This remarkable animated sequence takes us on a 50 million light-year journey through the universe. It was created by the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy.
A flight through the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, the most distant visible-light view of the universe. The redshifts of 5,333 galaxies were converted to distances to assemble a 3-D model of the data. This scientific visualization flies through the data to showcase its true 3-D nature.
Here are two short films with music showing the work to date of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The first film describes the process of the work. They are from the Cosmus, Open Source Science Outreach, a group of scientists and science communicators who are bringing science (particularly but not exclusively astronomy, astrophysics, and cosmology) to the public by providing visualizations that explain scientific concepts and data.
Watch Nancy Ellen Abrams and Joel Primack's TEDxSantaCruz lecture, "Changing the World Through a Shared Cosmology."
