Quotes About Theorists

Drawing on the best modern scholarship, this book seeks to rescue the history of networks from the clutches of the conspiracy theorists, and to show that historical change often can and should be understood in terms of precisely such network-based challenges to hierarchical orders

In short, we would discover, as we should already, that logic is in the eye of the logician. (For instance, here's an idea for theorists and logicians: if women are supposed to be less rational and more emotional at the beginning of our menstrual cycle when the female hormone is at its lowest level, then why isn't it logical to say that, in those few days, women behave the most like the way men behave all month long? I leave further improvisation up to you.)

It was her fault. All these theorists talk about how she hired a hit man. Some even say she pulled the trigger, but that's bullshit. She poisoned him with herself, that's what she did. That's what I'm talking about.

I hope you theorists know what you're doing.' 'I can assure you that we don't. The geometry is still beyond us. All I learnt in the void was that our best guess so far is certainly wrong.

Then there are revolutions. A new science arises out of one that has reached a dead end. Often a revolution has an interdisciplinary character—its central discoveries often come from people straying outside the normal bounds of their specialties. The problems that obsess these theorists are not recognized as legitimate lines of inquiry.

George Brownell. Franklin excelled in writing but failed math, a scholastic deficit he never fully remedied and that, combined with his lack of academic training in the field, would eventually condemn him to be merely the most ingenious scientist of his era rather than transcending into the pantheon of truly profound theorists such as Newton.

It's thus perfectly logical that the most acute threats to our religious freedom come not from some Orwellian gang of bullyboys in bad uniforms, but from gender theorists and sex-rights activists (and businesses happy to support them) who push "liberation" and who are very well suited to life in a brave new world. *

Most theorists suspect that space has an intricate structure - that it is 'grainy' - but that this structure is on a much finer scale than any known subatomic particle. The structure could be of an exotic kind: extra dimensions, over and above the three that we are used to (up and down, backward and forward, left and right).

Those theorists who complain repeatedly about the "externalities" that have messed up their model by fomenting this or that untoward event, before returning to the purity of the model, suffer from a debilitating disease: they act as if the models would work if only the world did not contain so many "outside" factors that are, in fact, imbricated and entangled in a thousand ways with the practices they study.

The fact that natural-law theorists derive from the very nature of man a fixed structure of law independent of time and place, or of habit or authority or group norms, makes that law a mighty force for radical change.

As far back as 1922, Ludwig von Mises wrote a 500-page treatise predicting that socialism would not work. Socialist theorists, he wrote, had failed to recognize basic economic realities that would eventually bankrupt the future they were creating. These included the indispensability of markets for allocating resources, and of private property for providing the incentives that drive the engines of social wealth.

University of Pennsylvania physicist Max Tegmark, the most outspoken proponent of the multiverse concept, believes that parallel universes already interact in definitive ways with our humble cosmic abode. Tegmark and other theorists think that our universe once had nine dimensions, but during the early stages of cosmic expansion, the three dimensions that constitute the parameters of our world stayed put, while the other six dimensions grabbed a cosmic taxi and split.

Victorian theorists competed to identify how many biologically differentiated races lived on Earth and proposed inherent characteristics for them, formulated explanations for these presumed variations in humanity.

Paranoia—because why should the conspiracy theorists get to have all the fun?

Lockdown America, as that triadic structure of police violence, mass incarceration and the death penalty, is one key assemblage of governing forces, of the state's "jaws." Theorists

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, two contemporary theorists of U.S. empire, have also suggested that the root of contemporary U.S. imperial abuses "should be traced back to the very origins of the country, to black slavery and the genocidal wars against the Native Americans.

There are a lot of unanswered questions about ancient music, not the least being why so many different cultures came up with so many of the same tonal qualities in their music completely independent of one another. Many theorists have concluded that certain patterns of notes just sound right to listeners, and certain patterns don't. Music theory, then, very simply, could be said to be a search for how and why music sounds right or wrong.

Creationists have also changed their name ... to intelligent design theorists who study 'irreducible complexity' and the 'abrupt appearance' of life—yet more jargon for 'God did it.' ... Notice that they have no interest in replacing evolution with native American creation myths or including the Code of Hammurabi alongside the posting of the Ten Commandments in public schools.

But the idea that Stoics don't have emotional skin in the game is a misreading of ancient Stoicism. The Stoics were the most nuanced of early emotion theorists, detailing the layered complexity of emotional life. They describe "proto-emotions" that we feel and can't control, and even a sage isn't impugned for experiencing these starts and startles.

For usage-based theorists, acquisition of language, while impressive, is not the only remarkable feat accomplished by the child. They compare it to other cognitive and perceptual learning, including learning to 'see'. That is, the visual abilities that we take for granted, for example, focusing on and interpreting objects in our visual field, are actually learned through experience.

Genuine scientific progress is a slow climb, which requires a stable society to support thinkers and theorists over many generations.