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Read it for real, try it out. Then you'll know.
I have, I studied these ideas at university. I'm just curious what makes these thought experiments harder than e.g. the double slit experiment, Plato's cave analogy or Rawls' veil of ignorance?
I have learned the stuff at university, too. But what they gave us there was good teaching, after several decades of practising their teaching.
When I read the original papers, much later, they were quite a bit harder. Especially some of the thought experiments.
Maybe not harder than those, but they are amazing, because the conclusions from them actually work.
There are other thought experiments that are unsolvable paradoxes, but these are cool exactly because they are solvable and the results reflect reality.
So I'd say Einsteins are among the coolest.
Also double slit experiment is not so much a thought experiment as it's an experimental phenomenon that is hard to explain.
Also Einsteins thought experiments are actual science, based on reality with actual results, not just imaginary philosophic ramblings like Plato and Rawls.
There are lots of philosophical ramblings about souls id and other nonsensical philosophical terms that have no evidence of actually existing.
It's pretty easy to ask a stupid question like: I wonder what a round cube would look like....
With nobody able to explain it, because it's nonsense.
The round cube exist in my mind, which means it has virtual existence, and virtual existence is a form of existence too. Meaning round cubes exist.
That's the kind of nonsense some people think is clever or deep, and think is evidence for things that are in fact nothing more than nonsense. According to the evidence, it's also how Jesus was invented.
The double slit experiment was first invented as a thought experiment, and later was built as an actual experiment. It's the same with relativity, first it was thought up, now it's experimentally verified. So the examples from relativity you bring up are also more experimental phenomena than a thought experiments at this point.
Yes and no, it's based on observed interference by Newton, Which was noted looked like how rings in water can interfere. So observation preceded theory, which was confirmed by reproducible experimental setup.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment
With relativity the difference is the huge amount of thought experiments that Einstein was able to connect to a coherent theory. That explains connection between many phenomena, and explains a very larger part of how reality works, And the Theory actually explains things way outside the original thought experiments.
Like the delay in the observation of mercury appearing behind the sun. Gravitational waves and other exotic phenomena. And can be used to model things that were unknown at the time.
It's ridiculous to claim the wave function is anywhere near general relativity in scope and significance.
In that regard the wave function is more like when Galileo figured that the sun was the center of the solar system.
It was not a thought experiment, as much as a mathematical result of observations.