What's the big idea?
What's the biggest idea? The greatest thoughts and revelations and inventions to come from humanity? Fire? Fiction? Penicillin? Pizza? General relativity?
Some big ideas I'm interested in, while we patiently wait for the theory of everything.:
Fiction. It can't be taken for granted that humans had a capacity for fiction. It took a while to develop. I'd like to know more about how, and why. The history of literature, or the history of the philosophy of imaginative literature, I suppose.
Evolution. I feel like people went very zero to sixty on accepting evolution. Most people. I'd have thought that such a seismic idea would take a little longer to settle in the public consciousness. So I'm curious about the evolution of evolution. And I need to know more about geology. Also, semi related, early palaeontology. Pre Leonardo da Vinci palaeontology.
Nature. It's something that comes up in a lot of the reading about the Romantics I've been doing. The concept of 'the outdoors' and 'scenery' and such. I really love Andrea Wulf's The Invention of Nature, basically, and I want to read more books like that. Not unrelated to the above, evolution.
The future. Similarly, people haven't always had a good grasp on 'the future' as a concept. When did we start thinking about how the world might advance in a century or more? We haven't always.
Got some reading to do it would seem.