Quotes About Theory

But it is a sad and fatal mistake to treat those other ways [atonement theories] as though they lay on the same plane with this one foundation way [penal substitutionary theory]; in reality the other "theories" of the atonement lose all their meaning unless they are taken in connection with this blessed "theory".

Every problem in quantum physics had to be first "solved" using classical physics, and then be reworked by the judicious insertion of quantum numbers more by inspired guesswork than cool reasoning.

At one point, Einstein had commented: 'It is quite wrong to try founding a theory on observable magnitudes alone. In reality the very opposite happens. It is the theory which decides what we can observe.

in 1906, ill and depressed, unhappy about the continuing opposition of many leading scientists to this kinetic theory of gases, he killed himself

Insomuch as Marxism eventually came to dominate social theory in some important regions of post-war European social theory, this resulted in the further exclusion of environmental issues from the discipline of sociology (Cotgrove 1991; Martell 1994).

We all agree your theory is crazy. What divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being right."* { Niels Bohr }

Trickle-down theory - the less than elegant metaphor that if one feeds the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.

Müller's theory of myth was actually based on the notion of a "disease of language," the idea that language itself was inadequate to express everything it had to and therefore was a major contributor to the development of gods and myths, which grew out of linguistic confusion.

It's strange. With all this harmonious interplay of numbers you would have expected the whole system to be a precisely coherent whole. It isn't. There are echoes here from the scientific view of a world formed by broken symmetry, subject to quantum uncertainty and (so far) defying a precise comprehensive 'theory of everything'. Is this why the 'near miss' is so often more beautiful than perfection?

Interestingly, it is the play between imaginary and real numbers that effortlessly produces the beautiful complexity of fractals and chaos theory, models of the recursive shapes and processes we find all around us in nature.

Law obviously existed because of a desire to lessen the quantum of suffering in a society. And yet law could only be said to exist where its enforcers had the power and will to inflict harm. Law, then, was not the setting of good against evil; it merely authorized the use of some kinds of evil to combat others. Moreover, Austin's theory located the law's authority in the

I find myself more and more relying for a solution of our problems on the invisible hand which I tried to eject from economic thinking twenty years ago.

The power of a theory is exactly proportional to the diversity of situations it can explain.

Scientific knowledge is as much an understanding of the diversity of situations for which a theory or its models are relevant as an understanding of its limits.

Confusing a model – such as that of a perfectly competitive market – with the theory of which it is one representation can limit applicability still further.

Die wichtigste Lehre für die Politikanalyse und -gestaltung, die sich aus der hier skizzierten intellektuellen Reise ableiten lässt, lautet, dass Menschen komplexere Motivationsstrukturen und mehr Fähigkeiten zur Lösung sozialer Dilemmas mitbringen als die Theorie der rationalen Wahl annimmt.

Good critics, who have stamped out poets' hope, Good statesmen, who pulled ruin on the state, Good patriots, who for a theory risked a cause.

Also, in every advancement of the world hitherto, the individual has led the masses. Thus, to elicit individuality has been the object of the best political institutions and governments. Now, in these new theories, the individual is ground down into the multitude, and society must be 'moving all together if it moves at all' — restricting the very possibility of progress by the use of the lights of genius. Genius is always individual.

There was nothing in her immediate ancestry to account for her. There was no explaining her except by the theory that some fierce spark of endeavor, lit by a forgotten pioneer ancestor, had lived on in the contented stuff of succeeding generations until the wind of a new age whipped it into a flame that was called Marianne Le Patourel. . . . Or by the theory propounded by the peasant nurse of her babyhood, who had vowed she was a changeling.

Charity could chatter dorm-room Marxist theory with the best of them, but a single look from cool, silver-haired Lady Beddington was enough to make her tremble from head to toe.

One theory has it that Bd was moved around the globe with shipments of African clawed frogs, which were used in the nineteen-fifties and sixties in pregnancy tests. (Female African clawed frogs, when injected with the urine of a pregnant woman, lay eggs within a few hours.)

not entirely clear why this is so, but one theory has it that the uplift of the Himalayas exposed vast expanses of rock to chemical weathering, and this in turn led to a drawdown of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. At the start of this

Darwin's theory about how species originated doubled as a theory of how they vanished. Extinction and evolution were to each other the warp and weft of life's fabric, or, if you prefer, two sides of the same coin. "The appearance of new forms and the disappearance of old forms" were, Darwin wrote, "bound together." Driving both was the "struggle for existence," which rewarded the fit and eliminated the less so.

The hit-thumb theory.