gedankenexperiment

• gedanken experiment, Gedanken experiment, Gedankenexperiment

From German Gedankenexperiment (“thought experiment”), from Gedanke (“thought”) +‎ Experiment (“experiment”).

gedankenexperiment (plural gedankenexperiments)

1. thought experiment
   • 2005 January 6, Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing‎, retrieved 2012-02-04:

     So here's a gedankenexperiment for ya: what if the DC and Marvel put all their funnybooks on the Web two months after they were shipped to the stores?

   • 2005 Aug, Eugene Mirabelli, “The Woman in Schrödinger's Wave Equations”, in Fantasy & Science Fiction, volume 109, number 2, page 143:

     John told her about his dissertation, about the equations he had concocted from a gedanken experiment. "What's a gedanken experiment?" she asked him. / "It's where you just think an experiment, but you don't actually do it, you just think it through," he told her.

Often found as two words gedanken experiment.