Animations of 6 Famous Thought Experiments

The Open Uni­ver­si­ty strikes again. In June, they released The His­to­ry of Eng­lish, a series of wit­ty ani­mat­ed videos that cov­ered 1600 years of lin­guis­tic his­to­ry in ten min­utes. Now, they’re back with 60-Sec­ond Adven­tures in Thought, anoth­er ani­mat­ed sequence that high­lights six famous thought exper­i­ments. It all starts with Zeno’s ancient Para­dox of the Tor­toise and Achilles. (Watch above.) Then we head straight to the 20th cen­tu­ry, to five famous thought exper­i­ments in physics, math and com­put­er sci­ence.

The Grand­fa­ther Para­dox (time trav­el)

Chi­nese Room (arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence)

Hilbert’s Infi­nite Hotel (the con­cept of infin­i­ty)

The Twin Para­dox (spe­cial rel­a­tiv­i­ty)

Schrödinger’s Cat (quan­tum mechan­ics)

You can watch the full series on YouTube and iTunes.