ABSTRACT
There is general agreement that thought experimenting has played an important role in the creation of modern science. Influential instances of thought experimenting include Newton’s bucket, Maxwell’s demon, Einstein’s elevator, and Schrödinger’s cat. As James Brown has argued, thought experiments can help us “learn apparently new things about nature without new empirical data”; that is, they help the scientist “get a grip on nature just by thinking” (Brown and Fehige 2011). This view leads to an obvious comparison between thought experiments and computational simulation models, which are ubiquitous in most fields of contemporary science. Indeed, the comparison has been noted, but the current framing of the discussion centers on whether computational simulations are “opaque” thought experiments or not (Di Paolo et al. 2000; Lenhard 2010).
