gedankenexperiment

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English

Alternative forms

Etymology

From German Gedankenexperiment (thought experiment), from Gedanke (thought) +‎ Experiment (experiment).

Noun

gedankenexperiment (plural gedankenexperiments)

  1. thought experiment
    • 2005 January 6, Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing, retrieved 2012-02-04:
      So here's a gedankenexperiment for ya: what if the DC and Marvel put all their funnybooks on the Web two months after they were shipped to the stores?
    • 2005 Aug, Eugene Mirabelli, “The Woman in Schrödinger's Wave Equations”, in Fantasy & Science Fiction, volume 109, number 2, page 143:
      John told her about his dissertation, about the equations he had concocted from a gedanken experiment. "What's a gedanken experiment?" she asked him. / "It's where you just think an experiment, but you don't actually do it, you just think it through," he told her.

Usage notes

Often found as two words gedanken experiment.

Translations