Thought Experiments Vs Real Experiments
"Thought" experiments are situations created in one's mind, asking a question akin to "suppose you are in this situation, assuming such is true, what would follow?". They are usually created to investigate phenomena that are not readily experienced in every-day situations. Famous examples of such thought experiments are Schrödinger's cat, the EPR thought experiment, simple illustrations of time dilation, and so on. These usually lead to real experiments designed to verify that the conclusion (and therefore the assumptions) of the thought experiments are correct. The EPR thought experiment lead to the Bell inequalities, which were then tested to various degrees of rigor, leading to the acceptance of the current formulation of quantum mechanics and probabilism as a working hypotheses.
Read more about this topic: Theoretical Physics
Famous quotes containing the words thought, experiments and/or real:
“The Lady Amelia would not for worlds have had the de Courcy blood defiled; but gold she thought could not defile.”
—Anthony Trollope (1815–1882)
“The man who invented Eskimo Pie made a million dollars, so one is told, but E.E. Cummings, whose verse has been appearing off and on for three years now, and whose experiments should not be more appalling to those interested in poetry than the experiment of surrounding ice-cream with a layer of chocolate was to those interested in soda fountains, has hardly made a dent in the doughy minds of our so-called poetry lovers.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else’s type of thinking.”
—William James (1842–1910)