He was an assistant in the Department of Philosophy, and John Stuart Mill Scholar at University College, London, from 1949–1950.
[2] In a seminal 1954 article[3] which followed on from the work of Max Black,[4] Thomson considered the successful completion of an infinite number of tasks within a given time, to which he gave the name supertasks.
To disprove the possibility of supertasks, he introduced Thomson's lamp, a thought experiment similar to Zeno's paradoxes.
This problem involves the mathematical summation of an infinite divergent series such as Grandi's.
A lamp (which may be on or off at the start of the thought-experiment) is flicked on and off an infinite number of times within a 2-minute period.