Thought Experiments in Scientific Discovery: What Emergent Mental Capabilities Underlie their Efficacy?

Examples from Archimedes, Galileo, Newton, Einstein and others suggest that fundamental laws of physics were—or, at least, could have been—discovered by experiments performed not in the physical world but only in the mind. Though problematic for a strict empiricist, this mode of discovery may have become possible, in part, through the evolutionary emergence in humans of deeply internalized implicit knowledge of abstract principles of transformation and symmetry.