Thought Experiments in Science and Fiction

The writer Emile Zola said that “the novelist is equally an observer and an experimentalist,” arguing that fiction could be a laboratory for discovery. While novels are not physical experiments, they can be understood as what Ernst Mach called Gedankenexperiment, or thought experiments. This is especially true for science fiction, which frequently engages in thought experiments about physics, biology, history, and economics. Extrapolation and counterfactual speculation are techniques used in both the sciences and in science fiction as ways of understanding the principles that govern the complex systems we observe.