IDK but be careful, if a thought experiment explodes, it can blow your mind.
this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2025
40 points (97.6% liked)
No Stupid Questions
43731 readers
717 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Have you taken a look at the plato.stanford.edu entry on such, specifically the bibliography?
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thought-experiment/#Bib
edit:
The number of papers, anthologies, and monographs has been growing immensely since the beginning of the 1990s. It might be useful to highlight that in existing literature, Kühne (2006) remains the most substantial historical study on the philosophical exploration of thought experiments. And Sorensen (1992) remains the most comprehensive philosophical study of thought experiments. More than other monographs both of these studies well exceed the author’s own systematic contribution to what is widely considered the primary epistemological challenge presented by thought experiments. Also, this bibliography does not include the many (we count about eight) popular books on thought experiments (like Wittgenstein’s Beetle and Other Classical Thought Experiments by Martin Cohen); nor do we list fiction that is related to the subject (like The End of Mr. Y by Scarlett Thomas, or God’s Debris by Scott Adams). Further, for undergraduate teaching purposes one might want to consider Doing Philosophy: An Introduction Through Thought Experiments (edited by Theodore Schick, Jr. and Lewis Vaughn, fifth edition, 2012, Boston: McGraw Hill Higher Education), and chapter 5 of Timothy Williamson’s short introduction to philosophical method (Oxford University Press, 2020). Moreover, a number of philosophical journals have dedicated part or all of an issue to the topic of thought experiments, including the Croatian Journal of Philosophy (19/VII, 2007), Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie (1/59, 2011), Informal Logic (3/17, 1995), Philosophica (1/72, 2003), Perspectives on Science (2/22, 2014), Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte (1/38, 2015)), as well as TOPOI (4/38, 2019), HOPOS (1/11, 2021), and Epistemologia (12/2022). Furthermore, a companion to thought experiments exists now: The Routledge Companion to Thought Experiments was published in 2017. Each includes substantial state of the art reports.
Some of the best (hardest) though experiments of all times, so far:
What makes relativity the hardest thought experiment?
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 studied these ideas at university
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.
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...
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
In 1801, Thomas Young presented a famous paper to the Royal Society entitled "On the Theory of Light and Colours"[22] which explained interference phenomena like Newton's rings in terms of wave interference.[23]: 101 The first published account of what Young called his 'general law' of interference
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.
The numbers make my brain smoke.
Godbless Archive
Wikipedia, but follow the sources
I mean more of a curated or collection of specifically thought experiments, discussion of same,
Wikipedia, but follow the sources and the edits X2
Wikipedia, but follow the sources and the edits
To frame thought experiments and their limitations, there’s a couple of recommendations.
A fundamental one is Dave Snowden’s Cynefin. It helps you match reality with how you’re thinking about reality. Cynefin helps to appropriately deal with thought experiments like the Raven’s Paradox. Similarly, there are other texts that help you critically frame thought experiments, such as texts on pragmatism, contextual functionalism, and relational frame theory. If I’m to recommend a single book, I’d recommend ACT in Context.
Now, as to thought experiments proper, there’s Daniel Dennet’s Intuition Pumps. That book holds plenty of thought experiments that I like.
I have another recommendation. It is a bit tangential, but maybe you’d be interested in George Lakoff’s framing. Lakoff would argue that frames are at least sometimes exactly the same thing as a thought experiment.