Quotes About Hypotheses

The scientific way of thinking is at once imaginative and disciplined. This is central to its success. Science invites us to let the facts in, even when they don't conform to our preconceptions. It counsels us to carry alternative hypotheses in our heads and see which best fit the facts. It urges on us a delicate balance between no-holds-barred openness to new ideas, however heretical, and the most rigorous skeptical scrutiny of everything—new ideas and established wisdom.

Science invites us to let the facts in, even when they don't conform to our preconceptions. It counsels us to carry alternative hypotheses in our heads and see which best fit the facts. It urges on us a delicate balance between no-holds-barred openness to new ideas, however heretical, and the most rigorous skeptical scrutiny of everything—new ideas and established wisdom. This kind of thinking is also an essential tool for a democracy in an age of change.

When enough fiction is written and enough scientific hypotheses are proposed, sooner or later there will be accidental concordances.

There are many hypotheses in physics of almost comparable brilliance and elegance that have been rejected because they did not survive such a confrontation with experiment. In my view, the human condition would be greatly improved if such confrontations and willingness to reject hypotheses were a regular part of our social, political, economic, religious and cultural lives.

In practice, all ideas need to be viewed as merely hypotheses; testing and evaluation of the test results must precede across-the-board adoption.

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

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!

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.

In experimental philosophy, we are to look upon propositions inferred by general induction from phenomena as accurately or very nearly true, notwithstanding any contrary hypotheses that may be imagined, till such time as other phenomena occur by which they may either be made more accurate or liable to exceptions.

Russians didn't elect Trump. Even if there was collusion, even if every hypothesis that has - that is at play in the Russia investigation is proved, still, Americans elected Trump, and he is president.

So far as hypotheses are concerned, let no one expect anything certain from astronomy, which cannot furnish it, lest he accept as the truth ideas conceived for another purpose, and depart from this study a greater fool than when he entered it.

If anyone offers conjectures about the truth of things from the mere possibility of hypotheses, I do not see by what stipulation anything certain can be determined in any science, since one or another set of hypotheses may always be devised which will appear to supply new difficulties.

There is no principle, built into the laws of nature, that says that theoretical physicists have to be happy.

But anyone who is practically acquainted with scientific work is aware that those who refuse to go beyond fact, rarely get as far as fact; and anyone who has studied the history of science knows that almost every great step therein has been made by the 'anticipation of Nature,' that is, by the invention of hypotheses, which, though verifiable, often had very little foundation to start with.

The results show how unreliable peer consensus can be, even when it is a peer consensus of highly intellectual people, if those people share a very similar vision of the world and treat its conclusions as axioms, rather than as hypotheses that need to be checked against facts.

people share a very similar vision of the world and treat its conclusions as axioms rather than as hypotheses that need to be checked against facts.

The more information you give someone, the more hypotheses they will formulate along the way, and the worse off they will be. They see more random noise and mistake it for information.

I have found increasingly more extensive and illuminating ways to use it to facilitate self-understanding, melt repressive barriers, liberate self-expression, activate self-healing—and continually test and retest my own hypotheses.

For superforecasters, beliefs are hypotheses to be tested, not treasures to be guarded," wrote Philip Tetlock after the study had been completed. "It would be facile to reduce superforecasting to a bumper-sticker slogan, but if I had to, that would be it.

Another learning which cost me much to recognize, can be stated in four words. The facts are friendly. (...) Especially in our early investigations I can well remember the anxiety of waiting to see how the findings came out. Suppose our hypotheses were disproved! Suppose we were mistaken in our views! (...) I have perhaps been slow in coming to realize that the facts are always friendly. Every bit of evidence that one can acquire, in any area, leads one that much closer to what is true.

Abstract thought can anticipate by centuries hypotheses that find a use—or confirmation—in scientific inquiry.

The brain has a way of confirming its own hypotheses. It's how we function in our world. That which fits within our definition and perspective of our existence is retained, if not amplified. That which does not is either rationalized or cast aside until an event so great or profound occurs that we must rethink everything.

Our scientists have created many theories, many possibilities about the advent of life, none of which have they been able to prove.

Scientists have an expression for hypotheses that are utterly useless even for learning from mistakes. They refer to them as being not even wrong. Most so-called spiritual discourse is of this type.