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Comment by chrisweekly | Hacker News Reader

"Our Gedankenexperiment demonstrates that..."

"Gedankenexperiment" sounds an awful lot like "thought experiment".

This has just unlocked a childhood memory of mine. I read a book as a young child about a girl and her grandfather who did experiments about space and time. The girl's name was Gedanken. It explored some of Einstein's theories in the form of short adventures. I've been struggling to find the name of the book. Does anyone else remember this book?

”The book you're remembering is likely "Mr. Tompkins" by George Gamow. The series features the character Mr. Tompkins, but in "Mr. Tompkins in Paperback" (which combines "Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland" and "Mr. Tompkins Explores the Atom"), he has a daughter named Gedanken. The stories are known for their accessible exploration of advanced scientific concepts, including those related to Einstein's theories, through fantastical adventures.” - GPT-4

AFAICT there is no character named "Gedanken" in that book. The correct book was findable in a few seconds with a traditional search engine: The Time and Space of Uncle Albert by Russell Stannard [1].

[1] https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_Time_and_Space_of...

Cunningham's Law:) I was only hoping to provide some direction. But thank you for finding the right answer.

I found and posted the answer in parallel with you, and then deleted my direct response when I replied to yours (at greater length as I initially posted only the link, which was sufficient for merely answering the question).

I don't think the posting of unverified ChatGPT snippets in response to factual questions on HN has value.

You have great search engine skills! Out of curiosity, what was the exact input you used, and on which search engine? I tried "adventure book girl named gedanken and grandfather on einstein theory" on Google and didn't get the right answer.

I had to refine it twice, IIRC, ending up with something like 'einstein book story girl "gedanken"' (the second refinement being by clicking next to one of the links that didn't include "gedanken"), for which one of the results was a New Scientist review of the book.

I did it on Google because I was on iPhone Safari, which doesn't have a good way to use Kagi by default, but I strongly prefer Kagi where possible.

I know we’re really getting into the weeds here, but I’m curious what issues you’re having with iOS Safari and Kagi. I’m using it with both normal and private tabs and it’s working great. There were a series of fixes in the past month to the Kagi app (necessary for Safari integration) that specifically addressed issues with private browsing. Might want to try it again. Good luck!

I just dislike the idea of installing an app or extension just to change the default search engine. Not Kagi's fault, entirely Apple's.

Definitely agree. Ideally you’d be able to extend the search engine list in Safari’s settings but alas.

I agree. I usually don’t respond with generated text. But in this instance I wanted to try to see if GPT-4 could sniff out the book that was being searched for. As of the dangers in GPT responses, it is easy to be mislead. I vetted the response (existence of author, books), but not in depth of what was actually asked for. And for that reason I failed to catch the error that you pointed out. But thank you for doing so, will definitely be more critical to GPT responses in the future. And also not post generated content that is clearly wrong.

So in effect, several possible responses were sent from the past, but the irrelevant ones were deleted, leaving only the right answer. Hmmm.

Incredible book.

In french it's Les Trous Noirs Et L'Oncle Albert.

I read that book when I was ~14 years old. I can't overstate how incredible that book was. Having a grasp of what special relativity was at that age really made me feel like I could learn anything just by reading the right books. I never stopped reading about astrophysics since then. And I'm now 40+.

Thanks for finding it! I guess my traditional search engine skills aren't that great these days. Searching either returned booked on Einstein or German titles.

That's the translation, yeah. They're a very important tool in physics for exploring the consequences of known or hypothsized physical principles.

With the main difference that it sound way cooler.

That’s literally what it means, and it’s a minor nitpick I have - it’s an English paper, just use English. Using the German word here just increases noise.

I think it comes from Einstein whose Gedanken Experiments lead to the discovery of relativity. Einstein came from a German-speaking country.

So what the authors are saying is "We're basically doing a similar thing as Einstein did". Jargon is to be avoided but this is more like a tribute to the great physicist Einstein.

A less charitable interpretation would be that is a form of self-aggrandizement.

It's both.

Sort of like wrapping yourself in the flag.

Of Einstein.

It's a pretty standard word used in quantum physics.

Source: I did a masters in the subject and remember reading it a lot.

There is something to it. If you say it is a "thought experiment" the interpretation is "of it's juts your thoughts right?" When you say "Gedanken ... " it means this is part of real research in physics (since E did it this way)

It's a pretty common word in research. After all, "thought experiment" is actually a translation from German.

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