Quotes About Theory

Truth in science can be defined as the working hypothesis best suited to open the way to the next better one.

Differential equations describe only the final condition in the case of the theory of ideally incompressible fluids. The actual process leading to establishment of the end condition of equilibrium from a state of rest is hardly conceivable without taking compressibility and braking processes into account.

In constructing a theory which derives the neurosis from causes in the distant past, we are first and foremost following the tendency of our patient to lure us as far away as possible from the critical present…It is mainly in the present that the affective causes lie, and here alone are the possibilities of removing them.

Any theory based on experience is necessarily statistical; that is to say, it formulates an ideal average which abolishes all exceptions at either end of the scale and replaces them by an abstract mean.

In 1938, Louise Rosenblatt introduced reader response theory or the transactional view of reading. She asserted that what the reader brings to the reading act - his or her world of experiences, personality, and current frame of mind - is just as important in interpreting the text as what the author writes. According to this view, reading is a fusion of text and reader.

I have come to recognize that the reason I devote myself to research, and to the building of theory, is to satisfy a need for perceiving order and meaning, a subjective need which exists in me.

obsession with method is one of the baleful aspects of modern literary theory, and it has not served society well in promoting the reading or writing of literature. Nevertheless,

All genuine political theories presuppose man to be evil, i.e., by no means an unproblematic but a dangerous and dynamic being.

All genuine political theories presuppose man to be 'evil'.

Without wanting to decide the question of the nature of man one may say in general that as long as man is well off or willing to put up with things, he prefers the illusion of an undisturbed calm and does not endure pessimists. The political adversaries of a clear political theory will, therefore, easily refute political phenomena and truths in the name of some autonomous discipline as amoral, uneconomical, unscientific and above all else declare this- a devilry worthy of being combated.

The remarkable and, for many, certainly disquieting diagnosis [is] that all genuine political theories presuppose man to be evil.

...talent and genius operate outside the rules, and theory conflicts with practice.

Pity the theory which sets itself in opposition to the mind! It cannot repair this contradiction by any humility, and the humbler it is so much the sooner will ridicule and contempt drive it from real life.

Theory must also take into account the human element; it must accord a place to courage, to boldness, even to rashness.

In 1877 he published his paper "Probabilistic foundations of heat theory", in which he formulated what Einstein later called the Boltzmann principle; the interpretation of the concept of entropy as a mathematically well-defined measure of what one can call the "disorder" of atoms, which had already appeared in his work of 1872, is here extended and becomes a general statement.

Here Boltzmann is referring to the fact that an atom cannot be a simple object, as was amply known in his time from spectroscopy. It was the study of this structure that paved the way to the theory of elementary particles in the twentieth century. These are the bricks from which one builds atoms and may derive a force between atoms of the kind imagined by Boscovich.

The ability to understand something before it's observed is at the heart of scientific thinking.

Space is created by the interaction of individual quanta of gravity.

Clues put us on the right path toward a correct theory. Strong evidence is that which subsequently allows us to trust whether the theory we have built is a good one or not. Without

And it is at this point that an extraordinary idea occurred to him, a stroke of pure genius: the gravitational field is not diffused through space; the gravitational field is that space itself. This is the idea of the general theory of relativity. Newton's "space," through which things move, and the "gravitational field" are one and the same thing.

We must distinguish between clues and strong evidence. Clues are what set Sherlock Holmes on the right track, allowing him to solve a mysterious case. Strong evidence is what the judge needs to sentence the guilty. Clues put us on the right path toward a correct theory. Strong evidence is that which subsequently allows us to trust whether the theory we have built is a good one or not. Without clues, we search in the wrong directions. Without evidence, a theory is not reliable.

quantum mechanics cannot deal with the curvature of spacetime, and general relativity cannot account for quanta. This is the problem of quantum gravity.

In technical terms, we say that Einstein has understood that "absolute simultaneity" does not exist: there is no collection of events in the universe that exist "now.

The quanta of gravity, that is, are not in space; they are themselves space. The