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Concept
Thought experiment
Summary
A thought experiment is a hypothetical situation in which a hypothesis, theory, or principle is laid out for the purpose of thinking through its consequences.
The ancient Greek deiknymi, "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 term Gedankenexperiment (from German: 'thought experiment') circa 1812. Ørsted was also the first to use the equivalent term Gedankenversuch in 1820.
By 1883, Ernst Mach used the term Gedankenexperiment in a different way, to denote exclusively the conduct of a experiment that would be subsequently performed as a 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) from Mach's 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.
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