Quotes About Theory

Since string theorists have failed to propose any way to confirm string theory experimentally, string theory should be retired

Science is not a practice so much as an ideology.

If the evidence says you're wrong, you don't have the right theory. You change the theory, not the evidence.

What has any poet to trust more than the feel of the thing? Theory concerns him only until he picks up his pen, and it begins to concern him again as soon as he lays it down.

While Money's theory of human newborns as total psychosexual blank slates may strike a contemporary reader as science fiction, such was not the case in the mid-1950s, when it was met with almost universal acceptance by clinicians and scientists

Most criminals were dumb, and he took the view that the whole science of criminology was essentially flawed, since much of its theory was based on the study of criminals who had been caught, and were therefore either stupid or unlucky, as opposed to the study of those who had not been caught, and were therefore smart and had a little luck on their side, but just a little. Luck ran out, but smart was for life.

There is no formula that can deliver all truth, all harmony, all simplicity. No Theory of Everything can ever provide total insight. For, to see through everything, would leave us seeing nothing at all.

The first scientist to contemplate the significance of places where things apparently cease to exist or become infinite ('singularities' that we would Now call them) in Newtonian Theory where the 18th century scientist leonhard Euler and Roger boscovich.

Science is predicated upon the belief that the Universe is algorithmically compressible and the modern search for a Theory of Everything is the ultimate expression of that belief, a belief that there is an abbreviated representation of the logic behind the Universe's properties that can be written down in finite form by human beings.

there could be more than three dimensions of space but they had to be small and unchanging if they were to avoid altering the character of the world that we experience.

Whatever the ultimate Theory of Everything is found to be, it will have a limiting form which describes motion at speeds far less than that of light in weak gravity fields where quantum wavelike features of mass are negligible. This form will be the one that Newton found.

I have shown you how Machiavelli supplied the immoral theory needful for the consummation of royal absolutism; the absolute oligarchy of Venice required the same assurance against the revolt of conscience. It was provided by a writer as able as Machiavelli, who analyzed the wants and resources of aristocracy, and made known that its best security is poison.

It was in 1742 that Christian Goldbach put forward his famous conjecture that every even number greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of two primes.

The atomic doctrine with Democritus' thoroughgoing undertaking to substitute a quantitative185 for a qualitative conception of matter with the location of the qualitative aspects of the world in the experience of the soul appealed only to the Epicurean who used the theory as an exorcism to drive out of the universe the spirits which disturbed the calm of the philosopher.

The vine of pedant theory is attached at both ends to the pillars of observed subject-matter

I think my favorite theory so far is that I am actually a robot. That's pretty great. In real life.

Mrs. Schneiderman's theory of life was that earth held no sorrow that food could not heal.

No theory of life seemed to him to be of any importance compared with life itself

And there hasn't been much progress in Darwinism since [the life of Darwin].

I'd say many features of string theory don't mesh with what we observe in everyday life.

No theory of the universe can be satisfactory which does not adequately account for the phenomena of life, especially in that richest form which finds expression in human personality.

Compared to the way in which final causality has – in actual practice, if not in theory and rhetoric – maintained its grip on biological thinking, the Darwinian "revolution" is a trivial blip on the continued silent and unacknowledged hegemony of Aristotle.

if a proposition cannot be falsified, it is not scientific.

But science is not a democracy. Science is a brutal arena where ideas are picked apart, attacked, and tested to see if they hold up. Those that do hold up live to fight another day. Those that don't are dragged off and discarded. To survive, a theory must be supported by vibrant, meaningful, replicable research.