Thought Experiments in Scientific Discovery: What Emergent Mental Capabilities Underlie Their Efficacy?
Roger N. Shepard · eScholarship (California Digital Library) · 2006
Examples from Archimedes, Galileo, Newton, Einstein and others suggest that fundamental laws of physics were-or, at least, could have been-discovered by experiments performed not in the physical world but only in the mind.Though problematic for a strict empiricist, this mode of discovery may have become possible, in part, through the evolutionary emergence in humans of deeply internalized implicit knowledge of abstract principles of transformation and symmetry.