Quotes About Theory

I get disturbed when we have a case that goes off on theory and does injustice to the litigant. I think we're there to try to do justice to him as well as to develop a great, overlying cloud of legal theory.

The defeat of Darwinism in the face of science can be reviewed under three basic topics: 1) The theory cannot explain how life originated on Earth. 2) No scientific finding shows that the "evolutionary mechanisms" proposed by the theory have any evolutionary power at all. 3) The fossil record proves the exact opposite of what the theory suggests. In this section, we will examine these three basic points in general outlines:

Quinn's Theory of Relativity' The likelihood of the relationship ending in divorce is directly related to the number of arguments during rehearsals,obsessive preparation and teh bride's budget on self.

Postmodernism is not a theory or a creed: it is more like an attitude or a way of looking at things. It didn't drop out of the sky—it showed up at this juncture in history, in Western culture, for specific reasons that have to do with the history of the West.

A generation ago it was the fashion to declare that we should not look for any meaning in a picture, we should be content with its "significant form." An artist was praised for painting his mother as if she had been a piece of cheese. But the human mind is strangely recalcitrant to such theories. It persists in taking an interest in the "subject" of a picture.

Lawrence Freedman

And here we come to the heart of Phil's 2-3-74 experiences. Certitude had he none. Oh yes, one can find numerous passages-in interviews, the novels, and the Exegesis-in which Phil advances a theory with the sound of certitude. But always (and usually quite soon thereafter) he reconsidered and recanted. Indeterminacy is the central characteristic of 2-3-74.

Modern critics, who refuse to let a plain thing alone, have now started a theory that Cervantes's work is a vast piece of "symbolism." If so, Cervantes didn't know it himself and nobody thought of it for three hundred years. He meant it as a satire upon the silly romances of chivalry.

I understood Einstein's general theory of relativity, which meant that I knew how to demonstrate every essential property of it in a page or less of concise and transparent work. It seemed to me that if you understood a theory, it shouldn't take weeks of calculations on an art pad to check its basic properties.

Some of its proponents like to say that string theory is a piece of twenty-first- century mathematics that has, by our good fortune, fallen into our hands in the twentieth century.

When we make a measurement on a system, we disturb it, typically by forcing it to interact with a measuring instrument. So Rule 1 does not apply to measurements. This is true not only of measurements, but of any interaction between the system and outside forces. So is there anything special about measurements? Measurements are special because they are where probabilities enter quantum theory.

The pilot wave theory predicts everything quantum mechanics does, but explains a good deal more. The mysterious way in which the ensemble seems to influence the individual is cleared up and explained straightforwardly as the influence of the wave on the particle. Both are real, and both exist for every individual atom. Everything that was puzzling and mysterious about quantum mechanics is revealed to be a consequence of that theory leaving out half of every story. Despite

Problem 1: Combine general relativity and quantum theory into a single theory that can claim to be the complete theory of nature. This is called the problem of quantum gravity.

If infinities are signs of missing unification, a unified theory will have none. It will be what we call a finite theory, a theory that answers every question in terms of sensible finite numbers.

Finiteness is not the only example in string theory of a conjecture that is widely believed but so far unproved.

So, Einstein's theory of gravity is a theory of causal structure. It tells us that the essence of spacetime is causal structure and that the motion of matter is a consequence of alterations in the network of causal relations. What is left out from the notion of causal structure is any measure of quantity or scale.

I'll describe the original approach of Barbour, but most of what I'll have to say applies to Gomes's version9, as well as more recent work of Barbour and his collaborators. A moment, for them, is a configuration of the universe as a whole. These configurations, according to Barbour and Gomes, are relational configurations, which code all the relations that can be captured in a moment, such as relative distances and relative sizes.

We have to find a way to unfreeze time-to represent time without turning it into space. I have no idea how to do this. I can't conceive of a mathematics that doesn't represent a world as if it were frozen in eternity. It's terribly hard to represent time, and that's why there's a good chance that this representation is the missing piece.

Because string theory is such a high-risk venture—unsupported by experiment

Basically, string theory is the development of this visionary idea in a context of a fixed background of space and time. Loop quantum gravity is the same idea but developed in a completely background-independent theory.

To quote Richard Dawkins, in The Blind Watchmaker, "The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is, in principle, capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity. Even if the evidence did not favor it, it would still be the best theory available." The

In practice, the greatest amount of information that may be stored behind a horizon is huge - 10^66 bits of information per square centimetre.

So the challenge for any quantum theory of gravity is to give us a deeper understanding of Bekenstein's entropy and Hawking's temperature.

So we may now pose a question which could be answered only if we have a quantum theory of gravity. What is the nature of the information trapped in a quantum black hole? Keep this in mind as we go ahead and explore the different approaches to quantum gravity, for a good test of a theory of quantum gravity is how well it is able to answer this question.