This helps explain the extremely wide and diverse range of the application of the term 'thought experiment' once it had been introduced into English. The irrealis moods are ways to categorize it or to speak about it. 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 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. 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. Ørsted was also the first to use the equivalent term Gedankenversuch in 1820.īy 1883 Ernst Mach used the term Gedankenexperiment in a different way, to denote exclusively the imaginary conduct of a real experiment that would be subsequently performed as a real physical experiment by his students. Johann Witt-Hansen established that Hans Christian Ørsted was the first to use the term Gedankenexperiment (from German: 'thought experiment') circa 1812. 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. It illustrates the counterintuitive implications of Bohr's Copenhagen interpretation when applied to everyday objects.Ī thought experiment is a hypothetical situation in which a hypothesis, theory, or principle is laid out for the purpose of thinking through its consequences.

Schrödinger's cat (1935) presents a cat that is in a superposition of alive and dead states, depending on a random quantum event.

What happened synonym