Quotes About Theory

The Pythagoreans... were fascinated by certain specific ratios, ...The Greeks knew these as the 'golden' proportion and the 'perfect' proportion respectively. They may well have been learned from the Babylonians by Pythagoras himself after having been taken prisoner in Egypt. Ratios lay at the heart of the Pythagorean theory of music.

We've been half right about a lot of things, but there's something missing from our theories, something whose nature we haven't even guessed yet. If we don't learn to understand it, it will kill us.

I hope you theorists know what you're doing.' 'I can assure you that we don't. The geometry is still beyond us. All I learnt in the void was that our best guess so far is certainly wrong.

I've never believed in wormholes," Fatima confessed. "Take two in relative motion and you've got a time machine. And I definitely don't believe in time machines." -"Maybe you can believe in just one wormhole at a time," Gabrielle replied, deadpan.

Durham said, "Do you know what a Garden-of-Eden configuration is?" Maria was caught blank for a second, then she said, "Yes, of course. In cellular automaton theory, it's a state of the system that can't be the result of any previous state. No other pattern of cells can give rise to it. If you want a Garden-of-Eden configuration, you have to start with it – you have to put it in by hand as the system's first state.

The job of economic theorists is to prove theorems. The job of policy economists is to figure out which theorems to apply.

As for the theory that these accounts were, perhaps, just stories – confections of creative minds – Gurney's response was scathing. "When we submit the theory of deliberate falsification to the cumulative test…there comes a point where the reason rebels", Gurney wrote.

Being spiritual-but-nonreligious sounds good in theory—at least it's better than attending antiquated religious institutions. We can do that. And we have. A growing number of us identify as spiritual-but-nonreligious.

La gran revolución que Marx teorizó no provino del proletariado, sino de la delincuencia organizada y de los políticos enmochados que permitían su crecimiento. Bien decía Ramos Frayjo: no hay crimen sin colusión.

Shifting the frame only slightly, the choice of a theory from among the range of always ideologically founded theories is itself necessarily ideologically motivated. Positioning is unavoidable; positioning is the result of choice from among a range of possibilities; that choice is socially meaningful - it is ideological.

Gladstone's was neither the first nor the last of great minds to be led astray by religious fervor, but in the case of his Studies on Homer, his convictions took the particular unfortunate turn of trying to marry Homer's pagan pantheon with the Christian creed. ... The Times was not amused: "Perfectly honest in his intentions, he takes up a theory, and no matter how ridiculous it is in reality, he can make it appear respectable in argument. Too clever by half!

Personally, I never admired communists because they operate on the theory that human beings are nice people.

The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of God's children, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil.

we will have learned to understand and express all of physics in the language of information.

Galileo saw the regularity because he already had a theory that predicted it. He understood what Aristotle could not: that a moving object tends to keep moving, that a change in speed or direction could only be explained by some external force, like friction.

Most seductive of all was an image that the authors called a strange attractor.

The great quantum theorist Richard P. Feynman expressed this feeling. "It always bothers me that, according to the laws as we understand them today, it takes a computing machine an infinite number of logical operations to figure out what goes on in no matter how tiny a region of space, and no matter how tiny a region of time. How can all that be going on in that tiny space? Why should it take an infinite amount of logic to figure out what one tiny piece of space/time is going to do?

But the experiment had never stopped. "There was the transition, very well defined," Swinney said. "So that was great. Then we went on, to look for the next one." There the expected Landau sequence broke down. Experiment failed to confirm theory. At the next transition the flow jumped all the way to a confused state with no distinguishable cycles at all. No new frequencies, no gradual buildup of complexity. "What we found was, it became chaotic.

Traditionally, when physicists saw complex results, they looked for complex causes. When they saw a random relationship between what goes into a system and what comes out, they assumed that they would have to build randomness into any realistic theory, by artificially adding noise or error.

Shannon used a phrase he had never used before: "information theory.

Libchaber's spectrum diagrams showed vividly the precise pattern of period-doubling predicted by the theory. The spikes of new frequencies stand out clearly above the experimental noise. Feigenbaum's scaling theory predicted not only when and where the new frequencies would arrive but also how strong they would be-their amplitudes.

In theory the World War II atomic bomb project was a problem in nuclear physics. In reality the nuclear physics had been mostly solved before the project began, and the business that occupied the scientists assembled at Los Alamos was a problem in fluid dynamics.

The birth of information theory came with its ruthless sacrifice of meaning—the very quality that gives information its value and its purpose. Introducing

The birth of information theory came with its ruthless sacrifice of meaning—the very quality that gives information its value and its purpose.