Quotes About Hypothesis

If you don't have material, you don't have an experiment.

A scientist... must accept the results of experiment, and nothing but the results of experiment.

Experimentation is an active science.

Faith is the choice of the nobler hypothesis.' Not the noblest, one never knows what that is. But the nobler, the best one can see when the choice is made.

First you guess. Don't laugh, this is the most important step. Then you compute the consequences. Compare the consequences to experience. If it disagrees with experience, the guess is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn't matter how beautiful your guess is or how smart you are or what your name is. If it disagrees with experience, it's wrong. That's all there is to it. – Richard Feynman

string theory is completely different from this. Here there appear to be no results whatever that provide it with experimental

Science fiction invites the writer to grandly explore alternative worlds and pose questions about meaning and destiny. Inventing plausible new realities is what the genre is all about. One starts from a hypothesis and then builds out the logic, adding detail and incident to give substance to imaginary structures. In that respect, science fiction and theology have much in common.

The dark-matter hypothesis is preferred mostly because the only other possibility—that we are wrong about Newton's laws, and by extension general relativity—is too scary to contemplate.

Today, the concrete data point strongly in the direction of the God hypothesis. . . . Those who wish to oppose it have no testable theory to marshal, only speculations about unseen universes spun from fertile scientific imagination. . . . Ironically, the picture of the universe bequeathed to us by the most advanced twentieth-century science is closer in spirit to the vision presented in the Book of Genesis than anything offered by science since Copernicus.27

Got a better theory?

No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.

You make experiments and I make theories. Do you know the difference? A theory is something nobody believes, except the person who made it. An experiment is something everybody believes, except the person who made it. { Remark to scientist Herman Francis Mark }

It is the theory which decides what can be observed

A truly rational theory would allow us to deduce the elementary particles (electron, etc.) and not be forced to state them a priori.

We need not know a thing in order to be able to investigate and control it. Where knowledge is absent—and in an absolute sense we can know nothing—a vague working hypothesis is quite enough for all practical and even philosophical purposes.

The fact that extremely diversified phenomena are explained in terms of laws having the same form or pattern gives us information... about the structure of the various levels of reality with which the mind deals; for presumably the pattern of a hypothesis must have some correspondence, if it works, with the pattern of the phenomena which it explains.

This is classic data mining. You draw a conclusion and then mine the data retrospectively to find support for it.

In order to be able to infer that "A causes B," we need to be able to run the experiment many times.

I formed the hypothesis that each of us could have achieved our objectives without the terrible loss of life. And I wanted to test that by going to Vietnam.

It's a hypothesis. History won't take us far enough to confirm it. And our certainties never really hold water. One day you feel like dying and the next you realize all you had to do was go down a few stairs to find the light switch so you could see things a bit more clearly.

I tell you what you'll never really know: all the medical hypothesis that explained my brain will never be as true as these struck leaves letting go.

You can't prove any hypothesis, you can only improve or disprove it.

which contemporary ecclesiastics were in good favor, which in bad, what recent theological hypothesis was suspect, and how this or that Jesuit or Dominican had skated on thin ice or sailed near the wind in his Lenten discourses; he had everything except the Faith

The whole edifice of modern physics is built up on the fundamental hypothesis of the atomic or molecular constitution of matter.