Quotes About Phenomena

Social psychology, the science of how people behave toward one another, is often a mishmash of interesting phenomena that are "explained" by giving them fancy names. Missing is the rich deductive structure of other sciences, in which a few deep principles can generate a wealth of subtle predictions—the kind of theory that scientists praise as "beautiful" or

The use of single terms implicitly hypersimplifies what are in fact extraordinarily diverse and complex phenomena (that masked complexity is part of the reason that the terms come to carry so much emotional weight).

The "world" of the Sumerians was not objective reality, as we presently construe it. It was simultaneously more and less—more, in that this "primitive" world contained phenomena that we do not consider part of "reality," such as affect and meaning; less, in that the Sumerians could not describe (or conceive of) many of those things that processes of science have revealed to us. Myth is not primitive proto-science. It is a qualitatively different phenomenon.

Freud catalogued an extensive list of phenomena akin to repression—the active rejection of potentially conscious psychological material from awareness—which he termed "defense mechanisms.

name) is an important part of the process whereby the infinitely complex world of phenomena and fact is reduced to the functional world of value. And it is continual interaction with social institutions that makes this reduction—this specification—possible.

Marxian Socialism and Bolshevism are two historical phenomena which have hardly a single common denominator.

It is, however, a most astonishing but incontestable fact, that the history of the evolution of man as yet constitutes no part of general education. Indeed, our so-called 'educated classes' are to this day in total ignorance of the most important circumstances and the most remarkable phenomena which Anthropogeny has brought to light.

It is the skill and ingenuity of the experimenter which show him phenomena which depend on a relatively narrow set of relatively easily realizable and reproducible conditions. If there were no phenomena which are independent of all but a manageably small set of conditions, physics would be impossible.

It is important to point out that the mathematical formulation of the physicist's often crude experience leads in an uncanny number of cases to an amazingly accurate description of a large class of phenomena.

Even though there is something out there that is not the world-for-us, and even though we can name it the world-in-itself, this latter constitutes a horizon for thought, always receding just beyond the bounds of intelligibility.

It is no coincidence that so many religious beliefs date back to times when no science could possibly have accounted satisfactorily for many of the natural phenomena inspiring scripture and myths.

Scientific careers rely on inheritance, environment, and random events, like all biological phenomena.

Everybody agrees that the brain is a remarkable machine. It's capable of generating an enormous number of phenomena, some of them very obvious and some of them less obvious. But I think that in the end there are going to be some very basic explanations for many things: emotions, awareness, consciousness, attention, perception, recognition.

When you have seen the eddies caused by salinity differences in the Panama locks, one prefers to give a wide berth to similar phenomena when they are on an oceanic scale.

Having abandoned past influxes, not creating new ones, he does not go along with desire, nor is he a dogmatist. Released from speculative views, the wise person, free of self-reproach, is not tainted by the world. (19) 914. "He is remote from all phenomena, from whatever is seen, heard, or sensed. With his burden dropped, released,214 the muni, not given to mental construction, does not desist, does not yearn" — so said the Blessed One. (20) [179]

Few of those familiar with the natural heat exchanges of the atmosphere, which go into the making of our climates and weather, would be prepared to admit that the activities of man could have any influence upon phenomena of so vast a scale. In the following paper I hope to show that such influence is not only possible, but is actually occurring at the present time.

It is an unfortunate fact that the bulk of humanity is too limited in its mental vision to weigh with patience and intelligence those isolated phenomena, seen and felt only by a psychologically sensitive few, which lie outside its common experience.

For the purpose of securing epithets at once accurate and felicitous, the young author should familiarize himself thoroughly with the general aspect and phenomena of Nature, as well as with the ideas and associations which these things produce in the human mind.

The conviction that everything that happens on earth must be comprehensible to man can lead to interpreting history by commonplaces. Comprehension does not mean denying the outrageous, deducing the unprecedented from precedents, or explaining phenomena by such analogies and generalities that the impact of reality and the shock of experience are no longer felt.

As a consequence, geneticists described evolution simply as a change in gene frequencies in populations, totally ignoring the fact that evolution consists of the two simultaneous but quite separate phenomena of adaptation and diversification.

We account for one-sixth of the forces of gravity we see in the universe. There is no known objects accounting for most of the effective gravity in the universe. Something is making stuff move that is not anything we have ever touched.

You will find that the dullest, most functionally illiterate mental mushroom has a very definite, very "scientific" view on one thing: the impossibility of any kind of psychic phenomena.

Physical science, more or less unconsciously, has drifted into the view that all natural phenomena ought to be reduced to motions. Light and heat and sound are all due to wave-motions, which travel from the body emitting them to the person who sees light or feels heat or hears sound.

Science is beautiful when it makes simple explanations of phenomena or connections between different observations. Examples include the double helix in biology and the fundamental equations of physics.