Quotes About Theory

It is well said, then, that it is by doing just acts that the just man is produced, and by doing temperate acts the temperate man; without doing these no one would have even a prospect of becoming good. But most people do not do these, but take refuge in theory and think they are being philosophers and will become good in this way, behaving somewhat like patients who listen attentively to their doctors, but do none of the things they are ordered to do.

The suggestion is that psycho-analysis, and in particular its assertion that the neuroses are traceable to disturbances in sexual life, could only have originated in a town like Vienna—in an atmosphere of sensuality and immorality foreign to other cities—and that it is simply a reflection, a projection into theory, as it were, of these peculiar Viennese conditions.

Neither do I greatly hope to influence the trained man of speculation, who has already found a theory of things which satisfies his reason.

science proceeds to build up a theory of nature by which the foundation itself is shattered. It saws off the branch on which it is supported. It kicks down the ladder by which it has climbed. It dissolves the thing perceived into a remote reality which is neither perceived nor perceivable. It turns the world of common sense into an illusion, and on this illusion it calmly rests its case.

Prospect theory challenges the assumption that people are rational agents who assess gains and losses the same way; in fact, it asserts that people are much more affected emotionally by losing something than they are by gaining the same thing.

Prospect theory explains why you feel terrible if you lose your watch, even if you have four other watches. You are mistaking it in your mind for your caveman's stash of buffalo jerky.

It is not of the essence of mathematics to be conversant with the ideas of number and quantity.

Mathematics cannot handle physical quantities like density that literally go to infinity.

Whether you can go back in time is held in the grip of the law of quantum gravity.

During my years at the synchrotron laboratory, I had become interested in the theory of quantum electrodynamics and had decided that what I would most like to do after completing my dissertation work was to probe the short-distance behavior of the electromagnetic interaction.

When you do calculations using quantum mechanics, even when you are calculating something perfectly sensible like the energy of an atomic state, you get an answer that is infinite. This means you are wrong - but how do you deal with that? Is there something wrong with the theory, or something wrong with the way you are doing the calculation?

The mathematics of quantum mechanics very accurately describes how our universe works.

I would say that I'm a feminist theorist before I'm a queer theorist or a gay and lesbian theorist.

The public brings our buildings to life, and we try to choreograph a lot of things, but our most successful work functions in unanticipated ways. Like the Blur Building. When little kids got in there, they cried or laughed or ran around. And no matter how much theory we put on top of it, it didn't matter: it worked.

Look at music like gaming. You monetize the game to all the people who are most engaged. I wanted to bring that theory and thinking to music.

The good thing I will say about the Chicago School is that it was always about the world, not about the abstract.

I wasn't enjoying the conversation that much. I didn't want to prolong it. It is the sort of man-to-woman infight that I try whenever possible to ascribe to premenstrual tension. I like the theory, but unfortunately in this case I happened to know that it didn't account for Klara, and of course it leaves unresolved at any time the question of how to account for me.

It is certainly not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable; it is precisely thereby that it attracts the more subtle minds. It seems that the hundred-times-refuted theory of the free will owes its persistence to this charm alone; some one is always appearing who feels himself strong enough to refute it.

All history is the experimental refutation of the theory of the so-called moral order of things.

The principles of classical management theory have become so deeply ingrained in the ways managers think about organizations that for most of them the design of formal structures, linked by clear lines of communication, coordination, and control, has become almost second nature. This largely unconscious embrace of the mechanistic approach to management has now become one of the main obstacles to organizational change.

The illusion of the viability of unlimited growth is maintained by economists who refuse to include the social and environmental costs of economic activities in their theories.

We shall try to show in the following that the views of modern physics are in agreement with the two ideas basic to Eastern philosophy that have been described above: the idea that the universe is an organic unity whose parts are interdependent and inseparable, and the idea that the cosmos is alive. Both of these ideas also arise in quantum mechanics and in relativity theory and find their clearest modern expression in quantum field theory.

more than once he saw the four equations expressing Einstein's generalized theory of gravitation: He never connected them with the little girl's chant: "Gik-lo, I-o, Rik-o, Gis-so.

Remember that every science is based upon an abstraction. An abstraction is taking a point of view or looking at things under a certain aspect or from a particular angle. All sciences are differentiated by their abstraction.