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Comment by granfalloon | Hacker News Reader

"The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought."

This is interesting to me. When I'm working on something difficult I often find my thought process to be very "verbal." Kind of like an internal monologue, talking myself through the problem. It's fascinating to think that my mental experience might be so profoundly different from someone else's.

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Yep, yours is probably different from physicists' mental experiences, not software developers'. One thing I've learned from discussions about physics is that the thought processes that are common to software development are largely foreign in the realm of physics.

Take for example Einstein's Relativity of Simultaneity thought experiment. [1] This is akin to discussion about a bug among software developers. Like developers can agree that a bug exists after discussion alone, a software developer could read the thought experiment and conclude there's a bug in physics (i.e. the general consensus at the time). But physicists don't seem to work that way. In discussions with many super smart physics-minded people, I've found that most reject that thought experiment, nay any thought experiment, as having value. Only a mathematically-based argument suffices for them. Imagine showing software bugs only mathematically!

[1] In Einstein's words: http://www.bartleby.com/173/9.html

Physicists reject that thought experiments have value? I'd say the context in which I most frequently hear the phrase "thought experiment" (or "Gedankenexperiment") is physics! Indeed, that is historically where the term originated. (And we must also consider examples like the very one of Einstein's you pointed out).

I also don't see any reason why thought experiments and mathematical arguments should be thought of as exclusive... I would think an important part of a thought experiment is often its mathematical analysis.

The way I see it, you hear about thought experiments in physics because of Einstein. Because of him they can't avoid giving them some credence. But the odds of a new thought experiment purporting to show a bug in general consensus physics being given consideration today is nil, and I'm talking about before the text is read. Using thought experiments to discuss current physics is fine as a starting point only. For new physics they are junk that immediately labels one as a crackpot.

Until the time of ~Einstein thought experiments were feasible enough because only the intuitive-upon-closer-inspection parts of physics were discovered.

The big problem is that the finer points of the new physics are just straight-forward unintuitive. To understand even quantum physics (which is very basic) on an intuitive level is sufficiently impossible and has baffled the community for some time (see also the resolution[1]). It is however quite possible to develop a good intuition for the maths describing it.

Sadly, the history of thought experiments and these discussions still linger in the vocabulary used to describe the phenomena. Many words are common words that inspire some people to invent their 'intuitive' own version of the theory, based on what the words mean in every-day discourse[2].

[1] http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/21st_century_science/lectures/l...

[2]http://www.energyhealing-quantumhealing.com/ for a particularly amusing example

> talking myself through the problem

Also interesting is that there must be at least two people to have a conversation. Who's talking and who's listening when talking to yourself? Wouldn't the person listening already know what the person talking is going to say before they say it? Then why have the conversation?

If he was imagining particle physics as little billiard balls I'm not sure vocalizing the problem mentally would help. Visualizing it is more helpful.

Try playing both sides of say a game of chess. I bet if you do it seriously you can't predict the outcome.

Maybe there is no difference. You said when "difficult" you go verbal. Well language, be it natural or math, is the means by which to think rationally and highly conscious. On the ohther hand creative thinking is more done in "pictures". I think they are calles schemas. Einstein said that he first created ideas by thinking physiscs and then rationalised over it by thinking math.

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