Thought experiments fuel science fiction. Like philosophy, science fiction explores the world as it could be. Any given science-fiction story is a thought experiment; the author conjures up a scenario and watches what follows. H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine conjures up a world containing a time machine and then lays out the consequences. Isaac Asimov’s stories in I, Robot conjure up a world containing intelligent robots, and Asimov then reasons about how we should interact with them.
