Explanation Quotes - Page 30

• Introverts keep their best stuff inside—that is, until it is ready. And this drives extroverts crazy! The explanation for the introvert’s behavior—and there must be an explanation for this behavior, say the extroverts—is that he or she is antisocial, out of touch, or simply a snob.

  Laurie Helgoe

  Crazy, Extroverts, Stuff

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• A detective with his murder mystery, a chemist seeking the structure of a new compound, use little of the formal and logical modes of reasoning. Through a series of intuitions, surmises, fancies, they stumble upon the right explanation, and have a knack of seizing it when it once comes within reach.

  Gilbert N. Lewis

  Murder Mysteries, Intuition, Littles

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• If alpha [the fine-structure constant] were bigger than it really is, we should not be able to distinguish matter from ether [the vacuum, nothingness], and our task to disentangle the natural laws would be hopelessly difficult. The fact however that alpha has just its value 1/137 is certainly no chance but itself a law of nature. It is clear that the explanation of this number must be the central problem of natural philosophy.

  Max Born

  Philosophy, Law, Numbers

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• It from bit symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom...an immaterial source and explanation...that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and that this is a participatory universe.

  John Archibald Wheeler

  Ideas, World, Information

  "Complexity, Entropy and the Physics of Information" edited by Wojciech H. Zurek, (p. 5), 1990.

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• The underlying physical laws necessary for the mathematical theory of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, and the difficulty is only that the exact application of these laws leads to equations much too complicated to be soluble. It therefore becomes desirable that approximate practical methods of applying quantum mechanics should be developed, which can lead to an explanation of the main features of complex atomic systems without too much computation.

  Paul Dirac

  Law, Too Much, Chemistry

  Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac (1995). “Sammlung”, p.391, Cambridge University Press

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• We like t'believe that everything's got an explanation...that our years on this earth make a safe kinda sense. We build ourselves up with explantions and rationalizations t'make us nice and comfortable--an' some people manage t'get through their lives without ever having to question any of it. But I think most of us have learned that...just when we least expect it...something comes droppin' down out o' the heavens...that blows all our comfortable ideas right t'pieces.

  Jonathan Kent

  Nice, Believe, Blow

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• As time passed I became an avid reader of popular scientific books, wanting to know as much as I could about the world in which I lived. Gradually I began to see a pattern of nonsense in much scientific writing. Scientific explanations given regarding the origins or functioning of various phenomena simply didn't make sense.

  Vine Deloria Jr.

  Book, Writing, Avid

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• Conversation! Supple sentences, with first and second meanings and overtones beyond, outrageous challenges with cleverly planned slip-points, rebuttals of elegant brevity; deceptions and guiles, patient explanations of the obvious, fleeting allusions to the unthinkable. As a preliminary, the conversationalist must gauge the mood, the intelligence and the verbal facility of the company. To this end, a few words of pedantic exposition often prove invaluable.

  Jack Vance

  Challenges, Deception, Fleeting

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• Correlations are not explanations and besides, they can be as spurious as the high correlation in Finland between foxes killed and divorces.

  Gunnar Myrdal

  Divorce, Foxes, Finland

  "Beyond the Welfare State" by Gunnar Myrdal, New Haven, 1958.

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• Explanations are a substitute for trust.

  Tullian Tchividjian

  Substitutes

  Tullian Tchividjian (2009). “Do I Know God?: Finding Certainty in Life's Most Important Relationship”, p.162, Multnomah

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• It is prima facie highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection. We are supposed to abandon this naïve response, not in favor of a fully worked out physical/chemical explanation but in favor of an alternative that is really a schema for explanation, supported by some examples. What is lacking, to my knowledge, is a credible argument that the story has a nonnegligible probability of being true.

  Thomas Nagel

  Together, Example, Alternatives

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• The remarkable insights that science affords us into the intelligible workings of the world cry out for an explanation more profound than that which itself can provide. Religion, if it is to take seriously its claim that the world is the creation of god, must be humble enough to learn from science what that world is actually like. The dialogue between them can only be mutually enriching.

  John Polkinghorne

  Humble, Profound, World

  John Polkinghorne (1995). “Serious Talk: Science and Religion in Dialogue”, p.75, A&C Black

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• The hallmark of a deep explanation is that it answers more than you ask

  Max Tegmark

  Inspirational, Answers, Hallmark

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• Discovering a new explanation is inherently an act of creativity.

  David Deutsch

  Creativity, Discovering

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• But that night as I drove back to Montreal, I at least discovered this: that there is no simple explanation for anything important any of us do, and that the human tragedy, or the human irony, consists in the necessity of living with the consequences of actions performed under the pressure of compulsions so obscure we do not and cannot understand them.

  Hugh MacLennan

  Simple, Night, Tragedy

  Hugh MacLennan (2009). “Watch that Ends the Night”, p.266, McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

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• In private many scientists admit that science has no explanation for the beginning of life... Darwin never imagined the exquisitely profound complexity that exists even at the most basic levels of life.

  Michael Behe

  Profound, Levels, Scientist

  "Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution". Book by Michael Behe, 1996.

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• Nature first, then theory. Or, better, Nature and theory closely intertwined while you throw all your intellectual capital at the subject. Love the organisms for themselves first, then strain for general explanations, and, with good fortune, discoveries will follow. If they don't, the love and the pleasure will have been enough.

  E. O. Wilson

  Discovery, Intellectual, Firsts

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• Doing mathematics should always mean finding patterns and crafting beautiful and meaningful explanations.

  Paul Lockhart

  Beautiful, Meaningful, Math

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• Mathematics is the art of explanation. If you deny students the opportunity to engage in this activity-- to pose their own problems, to make their own conjectures and discoveries, to be wrong, to be creatively frustrated, to have an inspiration, and to cobble together their own explanations and proofs-- you deny them mathematics itself.

  Paul Lockhart

  Art, Inspiration, Opportunity

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• The Christian claim is: Nothing explains the facts better than an all-powerful, all-knowing, omnipresent god creating the universe and sending Jesus to spread his message. This is about as remarkable a claim as could be stated, and yet it is tossed out lightly. Christians seem to imagine that "God did it" is as plausible as the natural explanation that stories grow with the retelling. The Christian has the burden of proof, and it's an enormous burden given this enormous claim.

  C. S. Lewis

  Christian, Jesus, Imagine

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• I didn’t do anything. I don’t have an explanation, I don’t know why I wanted to write. I did some short stories at that time, but very infrequently. I quit my job just to quit. I didn’t quit my job to write fiction. I just didn’t want to work anymore

  Don DeLillo

  Jobs, Writing, Fiction

  Don DeLillo, Thomas DePietro (2005). “Conversations with Don DeLillo”, p.78, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• Apologetic explanations do not develop unless there is a reality that has to be explained and defended. Jesus was undeniably a figure of history.

  John Shelby Spong

  Jesus, Reality, Apologetic

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• The truth is that when it comes to suffering, if we do not go to our graves in confusion, we will not go to our graves trusting. Explanations are a substitute for trust.

  Tullian Tchividjian

  Confusion, Suffering, Truth Is

  "Where Is God in Our Suffering? Tullian Tchividjian's 'Glorious Ruin' Offers New Perspective". Interview with Stoyan Zaimov, www.christianpost.com. October 30, 2012.

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• If there's a God, and we have all this evidence that there's evolution, but He created the world only 6,000 years ago - what is the best and most logical explanation to reconcile those two things? I came up with - He came up with it, of course - that all things are fakeable.

  David Javerbaum

  Years, Two, World

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• We live between two worlds; we soar in the atmosphere; we creep upon the soil; we have the aspirations of creators and the propensities of quadrupeds. There can be but one explanation of this fact. We are passing from the animal into a higher form, and the drama of this planet is in its second act.

  William Winwood Reade

  Drama, Animal, Two

  William Winwood Reade (1892). “The Martyrdom of Man”

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