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Thought experiment
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Thought experiment
A thought experiment is an imaginary scenario that is meant to elucidate or test an argument or theory. It is often an experiment that would be hard, impossible, or unethical to actually perform. It can also be an abstract hypothetical that is meant to test our intuitions about morality or other fundamental philosophical questions.
The ancient Greek δείκνυμι, deiknymi, 'thought experiment', "was the most ancient pattern of mathematical proof", and existed before Euclidean mathematics, where the emphasis was on the conceptual, rather than on the experimental part of a thought experiment.
Johann Witt-Hansen established that Hans Christian Ørsted was the first to use the equivalent German term Gedankenexperiment c. 1812. Ørsted was also the first to use the equivalent term Gedankenversuch in 1820.
By 1883, Ernst Mach used Gedankenexperiment in a different sense, to denote exclusively the imaginary conduct of a real experiment that would be subsequently performed as a real physical experiment by his students. Physical and mental experimentation could then be contrasted: Mach asked his students to provide him with explanations whenever the results from their subsequent, real, physical experiment differed from those of their prior, imaginary experiment.
The English term thought experiment was coined as a calque of Gedankenexperiment, and it first appeared in the 1897 English translation of one of Mach's papers. Prior to its emergence, the activity of posing hypothetical questions that employed subjunctive reasoning had existed for a very long time for both scientists and philosophers. The irrealis moods are ways to categorize it or to speak about it. This helps explain the extremely wide and diverse range of the application of the term thought experiment once it had been introduced into English.
Galileo's demonstration that falling objects must fall at the same rate regardless of their masses was a significant step forward in the history of modern science. This is widely thought to have been a straightforward physical demonstration, involving climbing up the Leaning Tower of Pisa and dropping two heavy weights off it, whereas in fact, it was a logical demonstration, using the thought experiment technique. The experiment is described by Galileo in his 1638 work Two New Sciences thus:
Thought experiments may be used to explore a hypothesis and the implementation of theories around it. They are also used in education, or for personal entertainment.
Examples of thought experiments include Schrödinger's cat, that was meant to attack the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics by showing that its assumptions could lead to the seemingly absurd condition of a cat being simultaneously alive and dead, and Maxwell's demon, which attempts to demonstrate the ability of a hypothetical finite being to violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
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Thought experiment AI simulator
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Thought experiment
A thought experiment is an imaginary scenario that is meant to elucidate or test an argument or theory. It is often an experiment that would be hard, impossible, or unethical to actually perform. It can also be an abstract hypothetical that is meant to test our intuitions about morality or other fundamental philosophical questions.
The ancient Greek δείκνυμι, deiknymi, 'thought experiment', "was the most ancient pattern of mathematical proof", and existed before Euclidean mathematics, where the emphasis was on the conceptual, rather than on the experimental part of a thought experiment.
Johann Witt-Hansen established that Hans Christian Ørsted was the first to use the equivalent German term Gedankenexperiment c. 1812. Ørsted was also the first to use the equivalent term Gedankenversuch in 1820.
By 1883, Ernst Mach used Gedankenexperiment in a different sense, to denote exclusively the imaginary conduct of a real experiment that would be subsequently performed as a real physical experiment by his students. Physical and mental experimentation could then be contrasted: Mach asked his students to provide him with explanations whenever the results from their subsequent, real, physical experiment differed from those of their prior, imaginary experiment.
The English term thought experiment was coined as a calque of Gedankenexperiment, and it first appeared in the 1897 English translation of one of Mach's papers. Prior to its emergence, the activity of posing hypothetical questions that employed subjunctive reasoning had existed for a very long time for both scientists and philosophers. The irrealis moods are ways to categorize it or to speak about it. This helps explain the extremely wide and diverse range of the application of the term thought experiment once it had been introduced into English.
Galileo's demonstration that falling objects must fall at the same rate regardless of their masses was a significant step forward in the history of modern science. This is widely thought to have been a straightforward physical demonstration, involving climbing up the Leaning Tower of Pisa and dropping two heavy weights off it, whereas in fact, it was a logical demonstration, using the thought experiment technique. The experiment is described by Galileo in his 1638 work Two New Sciences thus:
Thought experiments may be used to explore a hypothesis and the implementation of theories around it. They are also used in education, or for personal entertainment.
Examples of thought experiments include Schrödinger's cat, that was meant to attack the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics by showing that its assumptions could lead to the seemingly absurd condition of a cat being simultaneously alive and dead, and Maxwell's demon, which attempts to demonstrate the ability of a hypothetical finite being to violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
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