Are you a person existing within a vast universe, or a brain formed spontaneously in a void, hallucinating this very moment? Your experience would almost certainly lead you to believe the former. However, since cosmologists building on the work of the Austrian physicist Ludwig Eduard Boltzmann (1844-1906) suggested that the latter is actually far more likely, it’s created a complex puzzle for logicians, cosmologists and philosophers to try and untangle. Taking viewers on a mind-bending jaunt through modern cosmology, this brief animation from TED-Ed explains why the ‘Boltzmann brain paradox’ was born, the arguments some thinkers use to counter it, and why it’s a useful thought experiment, even if you didn’t just pop into existence to contemplate a thermodynamic puzzle.
videoKnowledge
Why David Deutsch believes good explanations are the antidote to bad philosophy
10 minutes
videoPhilosophy of mind
‘Am I not at least something?’ A surreal dive into Descartes’s Meditations
3 minutes
videoMetaphysics
What do past, present and future mean to a philosopher of time?
55 minutes
videoPhysics
What does it look like to hunt for dark matter? Scenes from one frontier in the search
7 minutes
videoPhysics
Imagining spacetime as a visible grid is an extraordinary journey into the unseen
12 minutes
videoCosmology
Tiny, entangled universes that form or fizzle out – a theory of the quantum multiverse
11 minutes
videoMetaphysics
Simple entities in universal harmony – Leibniz’s evocative perspective on reality
4 minutes
videoCosmology
The Indian astronomer whose innovative work on black holes was mocked at Cambridge
13 minutes
videoAstronomy
Seven years later, what can we make of our first confirmed interstellar visitor?
59 minutes