Need some help coming up with ideas? Here are some examples of famous thought experiments
• All good thought experiments explore deep questions or problems. This means that just imagining a crazy thing happening is not enough. For example, if a student imagines a situation in which they could fly simply by flapping their arms, this doesn’t appear to tackle any obvious problem. But perhaps if another dimension were included, this scenario might be used to explore a big idea. For example, what if half the population could do this while the other half could not? What would be the effects on society?
• Good thought experiments are clear and easy to imagine. They make it easier to think about difficult issues. The best thought experiments are like art works: they are vivid, dramatic, memorable, sometimes funny.
• Good thought experiments help people realize something that they didn’t realize before. For instance, John Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment may make people realize that a computer running on purely syntactical rules need not know what it is talking about.
• In good ‘dilemma’ thought experiments (like the trolley problem), people strongly disagree about what to do! This forces people to find deep reasons in defense of their preferred response.
The following books and films also provide some thought experiments we love:
Novels and short story collections
Ted Chiang, Stories of Your life
Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
George Orwell, 1984
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake
Ursula Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (and many others)
Isaac Azimov, I Robot (and many others)
Philip K Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (and many others)
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughter House 5 (and many others)
Stanislaw Lem, His Masters Voice (and many others)
Film and Television
Christopher Nolan films (Memento, Inception, Interstellar)
Charlie Kaufman films (Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Synecdoche New York)
Gattaca
Moon
Black Mirror
Star Trek
Rick and Morty