Quotes About Theories

The only one of the candidates this year who has consistently ignored and broken every rule in the Traditional Politicians Handbook is George Wallace. He doesn't do plant gates and coffee klatches. Wallace is a performer, not a mingler. He campaigns like a rock star, working always on the theory that one really big crowd is better than forty small ones. But to hell with these theories.

I should explain how my device worked. It operated by manipulating the ether, that non-existent substance which physicists had rationalised out of their theories on the usual grounds that if it could not be converted into one of their little numbers it could not possibly be there. Einstein's biggest mistake.

Scientists are people, and they are subject to the influences of their times. Theories explaining the world change diachronically or vary synchronically not only because of variation in the available data, but because of change and variation in the people producing the theories. Objectivity itself is culturally constituted.

Overall, the research suggests that conspiracy theories appeal to people who seek accuracy or meaning about personally important issues, but lack the cognitive resources or have other problems that prevent them from finding the answers to questions by more rational means

The distinction between mathematics and science is pretty well settled. It remains mysterious to us why mathematics that is invented for reasons having nothing to do with nature often turns out to be useful in physical theories. In a famous article,8 the physicist Eugene Wigner has written of "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics.

I don't at all mean to say that the early Greeks decided to write poetically in order to avoid the need to validate their theories. They felt no such need. Today we test our speculations about nature by using proposed theories to draw more or less precise conclusions that can be tested by observation. This did not occur to the early Greeks, or to many of their successors, for a very simple reason: they had never seen it done.

Unfortunately, string theory has not yet led to any predictions that can be tested experimentally, and as a result theorists (at least most of us) are keeping an open mind as to whether the theory actually applies to the real world. It is this insistence on verification that we most miss in all the poetic students of nature, from Thales to Plato.

La ciencia es acumulativa; cada nueva teoría incorpora las teorías anteriores válidas como aproximaciones, e incluso explica por qué esas aproximaciones funcionan, caso de que así sea.

This is often the way it is in physics. Our mistake is not that we take our theories too seriously, but that we do not take them seriously enough. It is always hard to realize that these numbers and equations we play with at our desks have something to do with the real world.

Plato and the neo-Platonists taught that the beauty we see in nature is a reflection of the beauty of the ultimate, the nous. For us, too, the beauty of present theories is an anticipation, a premonition, of the beauty of the final theory. And in any case, we would not accept any theory as final unless it were beautiful.

Science and technology benefit each other, but at its most fundamental level science is not undertaken for any practical reason. Though science has nothing to say one way or the other about the existence of God or an afterlife, its goal is to find explanations of natural phenomena that are purely naturalistic. Science is cumulative; each new theory incorporates successful earlier theories as approximations, and even explains why these approximations work, when they do work.

Though mathematics is used in the formulation of physical theories and in working out their consequences, science is not a branch of mathematics

What is most striking is not so much that Parmenides and Zeno were wrong as that they did not bother to explain why, if motion is impossible, things appear to move. Indeed, none of the early Greeks from Thales to Plato, in either Miletus or Abdera or Elea or Athens, ever took it on themselves to explain in detail how their theories about ultimate reality accounted for the appearances of things.

There's nothing in Keynesian economics that would allow you to solve stagflation. But there's nothing in neoclassical economics that would allow you to solve stagflation, either.

Mr. James Mooney investigated this interesting phenomenon and actually discovered the Seer, who proved to be an inoffensive visionary dwelling in a remote valley of the Southwest. This young man's life and theories (a full-blood, apparently untouched by Christian influence), curiously resembled those of Christ, and like the latter, he preached the doctrines of Nonresistance and the Brotherhood of Man. In this case our government played the part of Rome.

Across sculpted surfaces theories speak to me as poems. Literacy in fields of discourse crumbles amongst freaky sounds. Here are the sirens of not knowing everything. The map of whatever is stilted.

We humans seem to be extremely good at generating ideas, theories, and explanations that have the ring of plausibility. We may be relatively deficient, however, in evaluating and testing our ideas once they are formed

The damp floor of the Internet sprouted Lecter theories like toadstools and sightings of the doctor rivaled those of Elvis in number.

beware that] "many of what are called social problems are differences between the theories of intellectuals and the realities of the world—differences which many intellectuals interpret to mean that it is the real world that is wrong and needs changing.

Visions are the foundations on which theories are built. The final structure depends not only on the foundation, but also on how carefully and consistently the framework of theory is constructed and how well buttressed it is with hard facts.

More than ever, I've come to see conspiracy theories as the refuge of those who have lost their natural curiosity to cope with change.

The Nazis had adopted similar tactics all over Germany. The hour for religious teaching in the schools had become no longer available. It was used for physical exercises or for the teaching of "Aryan blood" theories. The German Christians had been set to work upon the children.

It is no reproach to the Freudian and Adlerian theories that they are based upon the drives; the only trouble is that they are one-sided. The kind of psychology they represent leaves out the psyche, and is suited to people who believe that they have no spiritual needs or aspirations.

The Influence of Archetypal Ideas on the Scientific Theories of Johannes Kepler.