Quotes About Explanation

How many mothers have emerged from a family trip to a Disney movie and been obliged to explain the facts of death to their sobbing young? A conservative estimate: the tens of millions, since the studio's first animated feature, 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs' premiered in 1937.

Friendship is the complete explanation of what a Cheetah Girl is - if you have that true friendship, you can conquer anything you want.

I kind of think that if you show conspiracy theorists a photo of the dead Bin Laden they will come up with an explanation for why it's really a Photoshopped picture of Bin Laden asleep. Or his dead cousin Fred. Donald Trump apparently believes that Bin Laden is dead, so that ought to be enough for the Middle East.

Let's make Donald Trump explain his hair.

Let me explain what I do here. I don't want to confuse you any more than absolutely necessary.

Not explaining science seems to me perverse. When you're in love, you want to tell the world.

Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain.

A dream...I was trying to explain to St. Peter, and was doing it in the German tongue, because I didn't want to be too explicit.

Chicken exits are self-sabotage. They give you a false explanation for why you don't have something you want.

Anytime you do something out of the ordinary, there will be skeptics. Everyone wants a reason why. That's fine. What's happened with me is just an accumulation of a lot of things.

I remember thinking, in Kansas my name will be Evett - which is my middle name. I didn't want to explain to anyone how to say Em-a-yat-zee.

The public wants to know why or why not. They don't want to know how you're going to do it.

The key shortcoming of the multiverse theory, however, is that it appeals to something outside the universe, namely, a vast ensemble of other universes and a set of meta-laws that exist for no reason (e.g., quantum mechanics, string theory). In this respect, the multiverse theory is little better than a direct theistic explanation where an appeal is made to an external creator/designer.

Culture influences our understanding of the world. Our biological perception equipment is influenced by our mental constructions; we do not simply 'see the world as it is,' either in the literal sense of vision or in the metaphorical sense of overall apprehension. Our explanations for the patterns we observe are produced in part by what we are taught about the rules of causation, i.e., 'how the world works.

The search for predictive and explanatory general rules—that's the crux of our game.

Reductionism describes the scheme, and it has a long history of successes.

This book intends to make the case for explanation by reduction to physics and mechanical engineering, to this alternative realm of explanation: not to alternative explanations but to explanations of phenomena with which the biologist's classical chemical reductionism just doesn't help. As we'll see, this realm not only explains different phenomena but provides information that makes wonderfully satisfying intuitive sense.

Electrons and photons are still worse. In graduate school I roomed for a time with a particle physicist. He ended one attempt to explain the essence of an exciting lecture by admitting, with uncommon candor, that he could think of no explanation, not even an analogy, that wasn't unacceptably misleading.

once one invokes the supernatural, anything can be explained, and no explanation can be verified.

Once again I repeat: the aim pf physics at its most fundamental level is not just to describe the world but ti explain why it is the way it is.

El gran éxito de Newton consistió en explicar los movimientos de los planetas, no simplemente en describirlos. Newton no explicó la gravitación, y sabia que no lo había hecho, pero es lo que ocurre siempre con las explicaciones, que siempre queda algo para una futura explicación.

The appearance of fine-tuning in a scientific theory is like a cry of distress from nature, complaining that something needs to be better explained.

But every once in a while someone finds a way of explaining some phenomenon that fits so well and clarifies so much that it gives the finder intense satisfaction, especially when the new understanding is quantitative, and observation bears it out in detail. Imagine

Nos proporciona un intenso placer conseguir explicar algo con éxito, al igual que cuando Newton explicó las leyes del movimiento planetario de Kepler, junto con otras muchas cosas. Las teorías y los métodos científicos que sobreviven son aquellos que proporcionan esa satisfacción, encajen o no con ningún modelo preexistente sobre cómo habría que practicar la ciencia.