Thinking about weird stuff - What is your favorite thought experiment?
Here’s an example: You drop a teaspoonful of ‘white dwarf matter’ or ‘neutron matter’ onto your toe. What would happen?
A thought experiment allows you to do things that normally wouldn’t work. Like how to get neutron matter onto your teaspoon. Here’s Wikipedia’s definition:
A thought experiment (a calque or English loanword based on the German/Latin compound Gedankenexperiment), is a proposal for an experiment that would test or illuminate a hypothesis or theory. Given the structure of the proposed experiment, it may or may not be possible to actually perform the experiment and, in the case that it is possible for the experiment to be performed, there may be no intention of any kind to actually perform the experiment in question.
The common goal of a thought experiment is to explore the potential consequences of the principle in question. Famous examples of thought experiments include Schrödinger’s cat, illustrating quantum indeterminacy through the manipulation of a perfectly sealed environment and a single radioactive atom, and Maxwell’s demon, in which a supernatural being is instructed to attempt to violate the second law of thermodynamics.
Care to share one of your thought experiments?
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13 Answers
It may not qualify for an experiment, but rather a weird thought.
I dunno of what to call it…I sometimes imagined that this universe is inside of someone’s stomach, and that’s why there’s so darkness around.
Another one: how would it feel if you grow out the universe.
Go past the event horizon and come back of course!!!
Then I would think of something to prove that lightspeed can be exceeded. Think Čerenkov radiation. Well, we know that light doesn’t always move at the same speed, but, you get my meaning.
I’m not sure if this counts, but I’ve spent inordinate amounts of time pondering how much of their own body a person could cannibalize before they die…
DON’T JUDGE ME. MY CREATIVITY JUST HAPPENS TO RUN TOWARD THE MORBID AND MACABRE.
@prasad – Sounds like the concept of baby universes ;-) Maybe your stomach is a womb.
Black holes are also very dark and supposedly they might be capable of growning new universes. It’s still speculation, but a lot of scientists create thought experiments around the idea.
@TaoSan – Some of your quanta can in fact come back via a tunnel “under” the event horizon.
If every belief and theory about our existence were true, how would they all fit together?
@mattbrowne
Huh?!?
is that a mechanics or physics theory???
Regardless, this surpassed my knowledge, and more importantly, capability to imagine such an event by far.
@TaoSan – Wave-mechanical tunneling in quantum mechanics, also called the tunnel effect. According to Stephen Hawking it also works at the border of black hole event horizons. The creatures suck in stuff and supposedly nothing can’t escape, even light. Well, stuff can get out after all… it seems.
I have to admit, Hawking has been sitting on my bookshelf for ages but I never finished.
Despite the 1-formula-limit :)
Aaah! Hawking radiation! Now I get it. Very hypothetical though!
Yep. Maybe a small black hole is headed for Earth and we can examine it to find out if stuff is oozing from it ;-)
That would be awesome!
I just can’t get Hawking radiation under the same hat with relativity. So I can’t say for sure if my experiment’s goal would be to prove or disprove….. anything… :)
2020worldpeace
creating a real opportunity for peace globally for the year 2020
a type of thought experiment called backcasting
making use of self-organising principles to help us mutually converge our diversity
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