Quotes About Theory

Calculate the fine structure constant from first principles.

Are you a vegetarian?" I ask, based on the evidence in front of me. She nods. "Why?" "Because I have this theory that when we die, every animal that we've eaten has a chance at eating us back. So if you're a carnivore and you add up all the animals you've eaten—well, that's a long time in purgatory, being chewed.

Darwin hat a wonderful scientific habit of noticing facts that seemed inconsistent with his theories.

As a final objection to Blair's entreaty, Douglass once again addressed the pernicious effects of colonization, which he saw as proslavery theory in disguise. Douglass insisted that slavery, racism, and future black equality be discussed as a single question, to be settled on American soil within American institutions.

Here it was again: colonization theory, gilded by the image of Jefferson, determined by God, driven by white supremacy while claiming otherwise, and callously argued by a member of Lincoln's cabinet.

Analytically speaking, Sigmund Freud talked out of his arse

And I became fixated, too, upon Katharine Hepburn's famous Fred and Ginger theory: He gives her class, she gives him sex. Was this a general rule? Did all friendships—all relations—involve this discreet and mysterious exchange of qualities, this exchange of power?

Each novel you read (never mind the novels you write) will give you some theory of which attitude is best to strike at which moment, and—if you experience enough of them—will provide you, at the very least, with a wide repertoire of possible attitudes. But out in the field, experience has no chapter headings or paragraph breaks or ellipses in which to catch you breath…it just keeps coming at you. 7

All I write is, to me, sentimental. A book which doesn't leave people either happier or better than it found them, which doesn't add some permanent treasure to the world, isn't worth doing… This is my "theory", and I maintain it's sentimental - at all events it isn't Flaubert's. How can he fag himself to write "Un Coeur Simple"?

Sometimes it is right to submit to love, and wrong to resist affection. Sometimes it is wrong to resist disease and right to submit to the inevitable. And vice versa. Each novel you read (never mind the novels you write) will give you some theory of which attitude is best to strike at which moment, and —if you experience enough of them— will provide you, at the very least, with a wide repertoire of possible attitudes.

It was the spirit of the times: we applied high theory to shampoo ads, philosophy to NWA videos.

A study, by its very nature, is an abstraction.

Men and events count for nothing," said the Republican, following out his theory in spite of hiccoughs; "in politics, as in philosophy, there are only principles and ideas." "What an abomination! Then you would ruthlessly put your friends to death for a shibboleth?

Politics consist in giving the nation an impetus by creating an oligarchy embodying a fixed theory of government, and able to direct public affairs along a straight path, instead of allowing the country to be pulled in a thousand different directions, which is what has been happening for the last forty years in our beautiful France

if reason and poesy persist in wrangling with the tools, the brushes, we shall be brought to doubt, like Frenhofer, who is as much excited in brain as he is exalted in art. A sublime painter, indeed; but he had the misfortune to be born rich, and that enables him to stray into theory and conjecture. Do not imitate him. Work! work! painters should theorize with their brushes in their hands.

Between the conception of the idea of this special relativity theory and the completion of the corresponding publication, there elapsed five or six weeks. But it would be hardly correct to consider this as a birth date, because earlier the arguments and building blocks were being prepared over a period of years, although without bringing about the fundamental decision.

Although it is not as famous as Kuhn's SSR, Bas van Fraassen's book The Scientific Image (1980) has certainly had a profound effect on the philosophy of science

Alexander Bird's Thomas Kuhn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000

Most of these take a strong stand and present a case either for or against impact theory. In my opinion, the best of the pro-impact books is James Lawrence Powell's Night Comes to the Cretaceous (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1998). The case against the impact theory is vigorously argued by Charles Officer and Jake Page in The Great Dinosaur Extinction Controversy (Reading, MA: Helix Books, 1996).

An authoritative and highly readable history of atomism is Bernard Pullman's The Atom in the History of Human Thought, translated by Axel Reisinger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Pullman traces the ups and downs of atomic theory through the centuries and shows how it finally triumphed only at the beginning of the twentieth century.

The Web of Belief, second edition, coauthored with J. S. Ullian (New York: Random House, 1978)

Such, then, are the basics of Popper's methodology for science: You make bold guesses and try your best to show that they are wrong

In the past a theory could get by on its beauty; in the modern world a successful theory has to work for a living.

The integrity of any theory, Kuhn argued, lies in its falsifiability - that is, its openness to the possibility of repudiation in the light of more evidence, fresh insights or a more creative interpretation of data whose significance was not previously understood.