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What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions is a 2014 non-fiction book by Randall Munroe in which the author answers hypothetical science questions sent to him by readers of his webcomic, xkcd. The book contains a selection [Note 1] of questions and answers originally published on his blog What If?, along with several ...
What If? 2 continues in the same vein as its predecessor in attempting to provide logical, science- and mathematics-based answers to extreme hypothetical questions and situations. [2] The author uses techniques made famous by physicist Enrico Fermi and his Fermi problems , with which the answers to seemingly complex questions can be arrived at ...
When referring to hypothetical future circumstance, there may be little difference in meaning between the first and second conditional (factual vs. counterfactual, realis vs. irrealis). The following two sentences have similar meaning, although the second (with the second conditional) implies less likelihood that the condition will be fulfilled:
The English term thought experiment was coined as a calque of Gedankenexperiment, and it first appeared in the 1897 English translation of one of Mach's papers. [11] Prior to its emergence, the activity of posing hypothetical questions that employed subjunctive reasoning had existed for a very long time for both scientists and philosophers.
In statistics, hypotheses suggested by a given dataset, when tested with the same dataset that suggested them, are likely to be accepted even when they are not true.This is because circular reasoning (double dipping) would be involved: something seems true in the limited data set; therefore we hypothesize that it is true in general; therefore we wrongly test it on the same, limited data set ...
In more detail: the scientific method involves making conjectures (hypothetical explanations), predicting the logical consequences of hypothesis, then carrying out experiments or empirical observations based on those predictions. [4] A hypothesis is a conjecture based on knowledge obtained while seeking answers to the question.
The scientific method involves experimentation to test the ability of some hypothesis to adequately answer the question under investigation. In contrast, unfettered observation is not as likely to raise unexplained issues or open questions in science, as would the formulation of a crucial experiment to test the hypothesis.
The hypothesis is a solution to what is known as the synoptic problem: the question of how best to account for the differences and similarities between the three synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke. The answer to this problem has implications for the order in which the three were composed, and the sources on which their authors drew.