Thought Experiments

Costas Christodoulides, George Christodoulides

Xiaojin Li (152688)

Alexander Bolano

Thought experiments have been the bread and butter of modern physics since its inception. Galileo used a thought experiment to argue that all objects fall at the same rate regardless of mass, Isaac Newton used a thought experiment to argue for the absolute nature of space, Maxwell used a thought experiment to argue the nature

Michael Stöltzner

Commenting on Atkinson's paper I argue that leading to a successful real experiment is not the only scale on which a thought experiment's value is judged. Even the path from the original EPR thought experiment to Aspect's verification of the Bell inequalities was long-winded and involved considerable input from the sides of technology and mathematics. Von Neumann's construction of hidden variables was, moreover, a genuinely mathematical thought experiment that was successfully criticized by Bell. Such thought experiments are also possible in string theory, where any (non-trivial) empirical corroboration seems to be out of reach. Yet appraising mathematical thought experiments and their contribution to physical thought experiments requires a dynamical account which in the spirit of Mach and Lakatos attributes due weight to informal mathematical reasoning or empirical intuition.

Gerhard Grössing

Abolfazl Soltani

In physics, whenever we cannot do an experiment in the real world for physical, technological, financial or ethical reasons, we use "thought experiment". In this letter, we prove that sometimes a thought experiment may lead us to the wrong results; and so, to achieve the definitive and reliable results, all experiments must be done in the real world. This means rejecting the use of the results of intellectual analysis of an experiment, namely thought experiment.