for a hypothesis as additional evidence is acquired. 1812 – Hans Christian Ørsted formulates the Latin-German mixed term Gedankenexperiment, meaning 'thought experiment', a method used since antiquity. 1815 – An optimal design for polynomial regression is published by the French logician Joseph Diaz Gergonne. 1833, 1840 – William Whewell invents the term scientist, previously 'natural philosopher' or 'man of science'. In his Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences he coins the term "consilience" the principle that evidence from independent, unrelated sources can 'converge' to strong conclusions. 1877–1878 – The American scientist Charles Sanders Peirce writes his Illustrations of the Logic of Science. The work popularises his trichotomy of abduction, deduction and induction. 1885 – Peirce and Joseph Jastrow first describe blinded, randomized experiments. 1897 – The American geologist Thomas Chrowder Chamberlin proposes the use of multiple hypotheses to assist in the design of experiments. 1900–present 1905 – The German-born theoretical physicist Albert Einstein proposes the theory of special relativity. 1926 – Randomized design is popularized and analyzed by the British statistician Ronald Fisher. 1934 – Falsifiability as a criterion for evaluating new hypotheses is popularized by Karl Popper's The Logic of Scientific Discovery . 1937 – The first complete placebo trial is undertaken. The American pharmacologist Harry Gold, studying the effect of xanthines on cardiac pain, alternates them with a placebo and shows them to be ineffective. 1946 – Work begins on the first computer simulation in history, a digital flight simulator developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for training bomber crews. 1950 – Research based on the double blind test is published for the first time, by Greiner et al. 1962 – The American physicist Thomas S. Kuhn publishes his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which controversially challenged powerful and entrenched philosophical assumptions about the progress of science through history. 1964 – Strong inference—a model of scientific inquiry that emphasizes the need for alternative hypotheses—is proposed by the American physicist John R. Platt. 1976 – The British-born, professor emeritus of statistics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison George E. P. Box publishes his Journal Article Science and Statistics, which sets a framework for statistical modeling of phenomena, and the need for only appropriate complexity in model. 2009 – Robot Scientist (also known as Adam) is created, the first machine in history to have discovered new scientific knowledge independently of its human creators. 2012 – Constructor theory, a proposal for