60 Second Adventures

2011, Philosophy  -  49 min Leave a Comment
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This is very interesting series of small videos in which the authors are asking many puzzling questions and they're giving simple explanations. For example how could a humble tortoise beat the legendary Greek hero Achilles in a race?

Will time travel ever be possible? What would happen if a man went back in time to a date before his parents were born and kill his own grandfather?

With no grandfather one of the man's parents would never have been born and therefore the man himself would never have existed. So there would be nobody to go back in time and kill the grandfather in the first place.

Can a machine ever be truly called intelligent? If there was a hotel with an infinite number of rooms and an infinite number of guests what happens if someone new comes along looking for a place to stay? Is it true that the faster you travel through space the slower you move through time? Is it true that before you measure a particle, that particle is in a superposition of every possible state all at the same time?

An economy is a tricky thing to control and governments are always trying to figure out how to do it. Back in 1776 economist Adam Smith shocked everyone by saying that what government should actually do is just leave people alone to buy and sell freely among themselves. He suggested that if they just leave self-interested traders to compete with one another markets are guided for positive outcome as if by an invisible hand.

The English language begins with the phrase "Up yours Caesar" as the Romans leave Britain and a lot of Germanic tribes start flooding in, tribes such as the Angles and Saxons who together gave us the term Anglo-Saxons. The Romans left some very straight roads behind, but not much of their Latin language. The Anglo-Saxon vocabulary was much more useful.

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