Services
Applied Big History
Explore new services, training, and marketing ideas through the lens of Big History.
Strategy by Design
Align vision and pragmatism.
Define and achieve goals.
Archetypes
Catharsis and Transformation through Mythic Drama
Recreating the conditions of
matter-energy in the early Universe
Atlas, LHC, Cern 2010.06.11
About
William Grassie is an interdisciplinary scholar, nonprofit entrepreneur, social activist, accomplished author, and organizational consultant. He loves the creative side and intellectual challenges of strategic planning and applied technology, branding and storytelling, advertising and marketing, event staging and project management. He reads, he listens, he writes, he speaks, he computes. Whether at a F500 company, an academic conference, a living room salon, or an interfaith gathering, Billy will engage with your audience with surprising insights at the intersections of multiple perspectives, diverse expertise, and illuminating stories. William Grassie is author of The New Sciences of Religion: Exploring Spirituality from the Outside In and Bottom Up (2010) and a collection of essays, Politics by Other Means: Science and Religion in the 21st Century (2010). William travels widely to speak at conferences, and enjoys many sports, including hiking, skiing, sailing, scuba, tennis, yoga, and dance.
William Grassie received a bachelor degree in political science from Middlebury College, and then worked for ten years on nuclear disarmament, citizen diplomacy, community organizing, and sustainability issues in Washington, D.C, Jerusalem, Philadelphia, and West Berlin. He studied comparative religion and philosophy of science at Temple University, where he wrote a dissertation entitled Reinventing Nature: Science Narratives as Myths for an Endangered Planet (1994). Grassie continued at Temple for five more years as an assistant professor in the Intellectual Heritage Program. He has held visiting positions at the University of Pennsylvania, Swarthmore College, Pendle Hill, and City College of New York. A recipient of academic awards and grants from the American Friends Service Committee, the Roothbert Fellowship, and the John Templeton Foundation, Billy served as a Senior Fulbright Fellow in the Department of Buddhist Studies at the University of Peradeniya in Kandy, Sri Lanka in 2007–2008. Grassie was the founding director of the Metanexus Institute, which promotes scientifically rigorous and philosophically open-ended exploration of foundational questions. Metanexus worked with partners at some 400 universities in 45 countries, organized a dozen highly acclaimed international conferences, and published an online journal—metanexus.net.
Large Scale Structure of the Universe
A web of billions of galaxies
M1 – Crab Nebula
Remains of supernova sited by Chinese astronomers in 1054.
Birthing grounds for chemically rich solar systems.
The Great Matrix of Big History
Read moreUnderstanding Natural Hierarchies through Big History Buy the Book: Applied Big History Our European ancestors once understood the universe to be a Great Chain of Being. All the entities of the world — animal, vegetable, mineral — were hierarchically organized. At the bottom were metals, precious metals, and precious stones. Then came plants and trees, followed by wild animals and
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The Economics of Cell Biology: A Little Big History
Read moreBuy the book! Getting Down to Business Economic metaphors help to better understand cell biology. In return cell biology teaches some first principles of economics. This “Little Big History” connects processes inside microbial organisms to processes of the global economy. Human Nerve Cell: Astrocyte grown in cultureCells are really small. You will recall that the diameter of a single hydrogen
Applied Big History: A Guide for Investors
Read moreBased on a talk given at the Research Retreat of Canyon Partners September 10, 2014, Beverly Hills, CA “If you don’t do macro, macro will do you.” —Daniel Och, CEO of Och-Ziff Capital Management Group Hedge funds are looking for competitive advantages in long-term investments. You want to understand large-scale market trends and investment opportunities in different segments of the
Recovery Planning for Climate Catastrophes
Read moreJoin with me in a thought experiment. Imagine a major planetary cataclysm. It could be a global nuclear war, a devastating pandemic, or perhaps rapid climate catastrophes. It could be a sleeper computer virus, wiping out all digital memory banks. In any of these scenarios, we would anticipate an economic and environmental collapse, though not necessarily in that order. The
Engaging the New Metanarrative
Read moreScience is progressive, and it tends toward consensus of necessity. Science discovers, illuminates, and crafts facts, and we rely on these complex facts in practical ways. Unlike religion, science is pretty much the same collection of complex facts in all cultures around the world. These facts are uncovered with considerable effort by peer-reviewed scientific guilds around a multitude of specializations
The Neurosciences of Bar Mitzvah
Read moreAttending a recent Bar Mitzvah ceremony, I was impressed, once again, by the wisdom of this ancient tribal initiation ceremony. The 13-year-old boy (or girl, in what’s called a Bat Mitzvah) is surrounded by family and friends as he recites the Torah portion in Hebrew and offers a short sermon about the importance of the reading. The ceremony takes place
Ha! Philosophy of Science at the Comedy Club
Read moreBack in 1989, I fell into a doctoral program when I discovered a passion and talent for teaching. Since falling in with Metanexus, I left the tenure-career track and became an itinerant professor, teaching occasional courses here and there—UPenn, Swarthmore, Peradeniya, and CCNY. Over the years, I have found myself in exciting teaching situations in universities and lecture halls all
Millennialism at the Singularity
Read moreReflections on the Metaphors, Meanings, and Limits of Exponential Logic Imagine billions of nanobots, tiny computerized machines smaller than your red blood cells, travelling through your body, inserted in your brain, all communicating internally with each other and externally with machines outside of your body. These nanobots could repair damaged cells in your body, destroy cancer cells, eliminate pathogens, provide
Post-Darwinism: The New, New Synthesis
Read moreA review of Ecological Developmental Biology: Integrating Epigenetics, Medicine, and Evolution, by Scott F. Gilbert and David Epel (Sunderland, MA: Sinauer 2009). As a combatant in the evolution wars here in the United States and abroad, I have penned and processed quite a few papers on the interpretation of evolution. This means also reviewing the vast literature in evolutionary psychology, particularly its attempts
Astrobiology and the Human Prospect
Read moreIn the Heavens as It is on Earth: Astrobiology and the Human Prospect The collision occurred on February 10, 2009 over Siberia at 0455 GMT at an altitude of 790 kilometers (490 miles) above the Earth. An Iridium communications satellite struck a defunct Soviet-era Cosmos 2251 communications satellite. Scientists estimate that the collision speed of the two orbital objects was
Leeches on the Road to Enlightenment
Read moreNo one warned me about the leeches. I arrived at Nilambe Buddhist Meditation Centre early on a Saturday morning full of trepidation. The Centre is located high up on the side of a mountain about twenty kilometers south of Kandy, Sri Lanka, where I am spending the year as a Senior Fulbright Fellow teaching comparative religion in the Department of
Eating Well Together
Read moreDonna Haraway’s Companion Species Manifesto It was a rainy fall day in Pennsylvania farm country. I was assisting the farmhand and the extension service veterinarian in separating the calves from a herd of some eighty Angus cows. The process involved herding the cattle into a pen and sending them one at a time through a shoot, where a vet inspection
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