I have a very different impression how the einstein thought-process worked. There is the issue of how thought experiments can be used to illustrate the findingds and then there is the issue how they were used to generate the findings. To my understanding he thought about all sorts of weird and edge scenarios to explore the rules and then when he found that the theory could not say what happens or that it would say contradictory things that there was reason to suspect it was wrong. He was not suspicous that the theories are wrong and set out to find where but drove them to their limits or even somewhat beyond in order to discover that another theory needs to hold in order to say about the inapplicable territority. And I was of the impression that most of the explorings of the old theory found the old theory to be adequate, although such trips might have served as fuel how to set up a even crazier trip.
For example in the scenario about pulling a rope vs falling I thought that the initial thought process expected that there would be a difference that would point it out. Having diffculty formulating what it would be, would lead to trying to imagine what would be the needed properties. The conceptual analysis leads to suspecting that maybe there is no fact of the matter which situation is which. This all involves a lot of different cognitive processes which is very different from simple “observing” (or is analogous how anything that is analytically provable is “trivial”)
The bit about ridicolousness and thought experiment also has funny connotation to it. Thought experiments are not offensive tools to aim at things you want to destroy. Sure they can wreck theories. But general relativity is a perfectly valid thing to thought experiment with. And in fact because black holes form singularities GR has been “wrecked” by them. GR accepts closed timelike curves examples of which can be thought as thought experiments. And we know that in their current state quantum theories are irreconciable even if they are valid in their own domains. Set up a sitatuation where both have a relevant thing to say and it becomes dicey to say what if anything our current understanding says should happen. Note that shördinger’s cat was supposed to show quantum theory as absurd. Things like aether are not conceptually that inconsistent it’s more that actual experiment speak against them. We knew how to test for the existence of aether pretty staighforwardly and not finding it made us think of crazy alternatives. I t was not the case that aether was found to be conceptually inelegant or silly and I woudl htink it was actually the occam razor favourite. Again demonstarting that a position is faulty is a very different thing from discovering that it is. And the tool is not resricted to tearing down string thoery tries “constructive thought experiment”. If you can tell a story that has basic ontology of strings but which contains the appearance of matter then that could give clues how to setup experiments that would yield otherwise unexpected results.
I have a very different impression how the einstein thought-process worked. There is the issue of how thought experiments can be used to illustrate the findingds and then there is the issue how they were used to generate the findings. To my understanding he thought about all sorts of weird and edge scenarios to explore the rules and then when he found that the theory could not say what happens or that it would say contradictory things that there was reason to suspect it was wrong. He was not suspicous that the theories are wrong and set out to find where but drove them to their limits or even somewhat beyond in order to discover that another theory needs to hold in order to say about the inapplicable territority. And I was of the impression that most of the explorings of the old theory found the old theory to be adequate, although such trips might have served as fuel how to set up a even crazier trip.
For example in the scenario about pulling a rope vs falling I thought that the initial thought process expected that there would be a difference that would point it out. Having diffculty formulating what it would be, would lead to trying to imagine what would be the needed properties. The conceptual analysis leads to suspecting that maybe there is no fact of the matter which situation is which. This all involves a lot of different cognitive processes which is very different from simple “observing” (or is analogous how anything that is analytically provable is “trivial”)
The bit about ridicolousness and thought experiment also has funny connotation to it. Thought experiments are not offensive tools to aim at things you want to destroy. Sure they can wreck theories. But general relativity is a perfectly valid thing to thought experiment with. And in fact because black holes form singularities GR has been “wrecked” by them. GR accepts closed timelike curves examples of which can be thought as thought experiments. And we know that in their current state quantum theories are irreconciable even if they are valid in their own domains. Set up a sitatuation where both have a relevant thing to say and it becomes dicey to say what if anything our current understanding says should happen. Note that shördinger’s cat was supposed to show quantum theory as absurd. Things like aether are not conceptually that inconsistent it’s more that actual experiment speak against them. We knew how to test for the existence of aether pretty staighforwardly and not finding it made us think of crazy alternatives. I t was not the case that aether was found to be conceptually inelegant or silly and I woudl htink it was actually the occam razor favourite. Again demonstarting that a position is faulty is a very different thing from discovering that it is. And the tool is not resricted to tearing down string thoery tries “constructive thought experiment”. If you can tell a story that has basic ontology of strings but which contains the appearance of matter then that could give clues how to setup experiments that would yield otherwise unexpected results.
Thanks, you’re making lots of good points and improvements on the role of thought experiments that I didn’t adequately capture in the post.