Quotes About Theories

A prize-winning science reporter, Simons had become the number-two editor at the Post a year before. An intent, sensitive man with a large nose, thin face and deep-set eyes, he looks like the kind of Harvard teaching assistant who carries a slide ruler strapped to his belt. But he is skillful with fragile egos, and also the perfect counterpoint to Bradlee. Bradlee is more like Woodward: he wants hard information first and is impatient with theories. -- Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward

Hostility to theory usually means an opposition to other people's theories and an oblivion of one's own. One purpose of this book is to lift that repression and allow us to remember.

Whole new theories of money were growing here like mushrooms: in the dark and based on bullshit.

Nowadays only cosmologists and particle physicists are allowed to invent new kinds of matter when they want to explain why their theories totally fail to match observed reality.

Theories are a fluid road map for solving a mystery and, if broached with an open mind and scrupulous attention to detail, they grant the answers you seek.

key linguistic concepts and theories related to Arabic in a coherent way,

We must regard all laws or theories as hypothetical or conjectural; that is, as guesses.

Theories are nets cast to catch what we call 'the world': to rationalize, to explain, and to master it. We endeavor to make the mesh ever finer and finer.

Popper was already working towards his 'fallibilist' view that theories can never be proved, although they can be decisively disproved—but it had survived a severe test, and had emerged as a theory worth embracing.

By criticizing our theories we can let our theories die in our stead.

In the empirical sciences, which alone can furnish us with information about the world we live in, proofs do not occur, if we mean by 'proof' an argument which establishes once and for ever the truth of a theory.

While an uncritical animal may be eliminated altogether with its dogmatically held hypotheses, we may formulate our hypotheses, and criticize them. Let our conjectures, our theories die in our stead!

The way of science is paved with discarded theories which were once declared self-evident;

The question of the acceptance of theories should, I propose, be demoted to the status of a minor problem. For science may be regarded as a growing system of problems, rather than as a system of beliefs. And for a system of problems, the tentative acceptance of a theory or a conjecture means hardly more than that it is considered worthy of further criticism.

The method of science depends upon our attempts to describe the world with simple theories: theories that are complex may become untestable , even if they happen to be true. Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification–the art of discerning what we may with advantage omit.

Never let yourself be goaded into taking seriously problems about words and their meanings. What must be taken seriously are questions of fact, and assertions about facts: theories and hypotheses; the problems they solve; and the problems they raise.

Science's best-known victories were those of Copernicanism and Darwinism.

In Victorian times, one of the more serious reasons for opposing Darwin was the fear that his theories would lead to the law of the jungle, the abandonment of ethical constraints in society. In nearly all of these cases, however, it is not so much science as its application (often by nonscientists) that has been under judgment.

My childhood wasn't a movie, of course, though it did have chase sequences, fight scenes, shoot-outs, skyjacking, life and death suspense, and suicide. The plot didn't make much sense to me as a boy, but it does now. It turns out I was attending an academy of sorts, and though hopefully on different subjects, so were you. No matter what your major, you too have been studying people for a long time, carefully developing theories and strategies to predict what they might do.

In science, there are no universal truths, just views of the world that have yet to be shown to be false.

The current worldview is never claimed to be correct, in the very important sense that there are no absolute truths in science. The body of scientific knowledge at any point in history, including now, is simply the collection of theories and views of the world that have not yet been shown to be wrong.

At the moment I have very little evidence and lots of theories. I'm itching to reverse the proportions.

It is unfortunate for us, that, of some of the greatest men, we know least, and talk most. Homer, Socrates, and Shakespere have, perhaps, contributed more to the intellectual enlightenment of mankind than any other three writers who could be named, and yet the history of all three has given rise to a boundless ocean of discussion, which has left us little save the option of choosing which theory or theories we will follow.

But however imperfect, even repugnant, were particular policies, particular actions, there remained the purity of the ideal, represented in the theories of Karl Marx and the noble visions of many lesser thinkers and writers.