Putting the ‘Experiment’ back into the ‘Thought Experiment’

The Epr Thought - Experiment and the Epr

Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen (EPR) argued that the quantum-mechanical probabilistic description of physical reality had to be incomplete, in order to avoid an instantaneous action between distant measurements. This suggested the need for additional “hidden variables”, allowing for the recovery of determinism and locality, but such a solution has been disproved experimentally. Here, I present an...

Thought-Experiment: On Loving The Oppressors

The Thought Experiment Approach to Qualitative Physics

This paper discusses the application of the thought experiment methodology to qualita­ tive reasoning. Problem solving using this technique involves simplification of the origi­ nal problem, solution of the simplified problem, and generalization of the results obtained. Our emphasis in this work is to demonstrate the ef­ fectiveness of this approach in addressing com­ plexity and grain size iss...

The neurology–psychiatry divide: a thought experiment†

Diseases of the brain are generally classified as either neurological or psychiatric. However, these two groups of illnesses cannot be readily separated on the basis of pathophysiology or symptomatology. It is difficult to rationally explain to someone with no prior frame of reference why we have the split between neurological and psychiatric illness. This demonstrates that the division is unte...

Notes on Leibniz thought experiment

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Monadology (1714), §17 [1]: “Besides, it must be admitted that perception, and anything that depends on it, cannot be explained in terms of mechanistic causation – that is, in terms of shapes and motions. Let us pretend that there was a machine, which was constructed in such a way as to give rise to thinking, sensing, and having perceptions. You could imagine it expan...