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arXiv:0812.2539

A short insight about Thought experiment in Modern Physics

Dragoljub A. Cucić

Published Dec 13, 2008• 4 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Thought experiment is an apparition in a modern Science, which is in last 100 Years took sweep. Work is based at the aspect of Physics, because and the writer is from Physics. Manners to study thought experiments are multiple, and this work is only one aspect in that complex of feasibility. About real character of thought experiment will be made conclusion when analyze, like this attempt, in other Sciences.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.0812.2539

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Thought experiment is an apparition in a modern Science, which is in last 100 Years took sweep. Work is based at the aspect of Physics, because and the writer is from Physics. Manners to study thought experiments are multiple, and this work is only one aspect in that complex of feasibility. About real character of thought experiment will be made conclusion when analyze, like this attempt, in other Sciences.
My theme is thought experiment in natural science, and its relation to real experiment. I shall defend the thesis that thought experiments that do not lead to theorizing and to a real experiment are generally of much less value that those that do so. To illustrate this thesis I refer to three examples, from three very different periods, and with three very different kinds of status. The first is the classic thought experiment in which Galileo imagined that he had, by pure thought, demolished Aristoteles' dogma that heavier bodies fall more quickly than light ones. I will show that he was mistaken. The second is the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paper purporting to show that quantum mechanics must be incomplete in its domain of application. This thought experiment is a very good one, not because its conclusions are correct, but precisely because it was fruitful, leading to theory and, above all, to a real experiment. Finally I discuss the modern string theory of everything, which, while it is regarded as a physical theory by its instigators, shares some properties of the least successful sort of thought experiment.
The author describes several thought experiments that are important in modern physics, by which he mean the physical theory and practice that developed explosively from the late 19th century onwards. Some thought experiments provide the basis for rigorous arguments with clear conclusions; others seem to work simply by drawing attention to an important question that otherwise might not have been apparent. While the thought experiments to be discussed here are key turning points in the history of modern physical theory, in several cases their full implications remain to be plumbed. It is an extraordinary fact that most of the decisive thought experiments in 20th-century physics were born from the fertile imagination of one person, Albert Einstein. This forces to ponder the importance of individual creativity in the advancement of science. The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) thought experiment dominates investigations of the foundations of quantum mechanics and plays a defining role in quantum information theory.
In a recent number of Blackfriars (July, 1949) Dr A. W. Gledhill has discussed very competently some aspects of the statistical method as used in modern physics. He has tried to show there ‘that modern physical theory does not contradict the principle of causality’. Having made a study of this subject over quite a number of years, the writer, while agreeing with some of Dr Gledhill’s conclusions, feels nevertheless that there are a few points which have not been covered as adequately as the importance of the subject for modern philosophy seems to warrant. In order to understand the controversy about the validity or non-validity of the principle of causality, which has been initiated by Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, it is necessary to realise, first of all, that when a physicist speaks about causality, he usually does not mean the same thing as a scholastic philosopher. In scholastic philosophy one distinguishes different kinds of causes, such as the material, the efficient, the final, as well as the formal and exemplary causes. The classical physicist, on the other hand, since the time of Galileo, admits only efficient causes. Let us therefore give a brief sketch of the development of this concept of scientific causality and show the reasons for this limitation. The purpose of a scientific theory is the prediction of events among the natural objects which form the field of enquiry of the particular science concerned. Evidently, the more certain the prediction, the better the theory on which it is based.