Hypothesis Quotes - Page 10

I am not well qualified to criticize the theory of rational expectations and the efficient market hypothesis because as a market participant I considered them so unrealistic that I never bothered to study them.

George Soros

Expectations, Study, Theory

George Soros' Remarks at the Festival of Economics, www.georgesoros.com. June 2, 2012.

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Napoleon: You have written this huge book on the system of the world without once mentioning the author of the universe. Laplace: Sire, I had no need of that hypothesis. Later when told by Napoleon about the incident, Lagrange commented: Ah, but that is a fine hypothesis. It explains so many things.

Pierre-Simon Laplace

Book, Needs, World

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Our hypotheses are initially rooted in theoretical consistency and elegance, but...ultimatel y it is experiment not rigid belief that determines what is correct.

Lisa Randall

Consistency, Belief, Elegance

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Hypotheses are what we lack the least.

Henri Poincare

Henri Poincare (2012). “The Value of Science: Essential Writings of Henri Poincare”, p.225, Modern Library

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...it's my hypothesis that the individual is not a pre-given entity which is seized on by the exercise of power. The individual, with his identity and characteristics, is the product of a relation of power exercised over bodies, multiplicities, movements, desires, forces.

Michel Foucault

Exercise, Desire, Identity

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If by religion we are to understand sectarian dogmas, in which no two of them agree, then your exclamation on that hypothesis is just, "that this would be the best of worlds if there were no religion in it.

Thomas Jefferson

Two, Would Be, World

Thomas Jefferson (1829). “Memoir, correspondence, and miscellanies from the papers of T. Jefferson”

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Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art; it arises in hypothesis and flows into achievement.

Will Durant

Art, Philosophy, Achievement

Will Durant (2012). “Story of Philosophy”, p.27, Simon and Schuster

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Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis: you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory.

Stephen Hawking

Matter, Next, Results

"A Brief History of Time". Book by Steven Hawking, 1989.

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A hypothesis or theory is clear, decisive, and positive, but it is believed by no one but the man who created it. Experimental findings, on the other hand, are messy, inexact things, which are believed by everyone except the man who did that work.

Harlow Shapley

Science, Men, Hands

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Most modern biologists, having reviewed with satisfaction the downfall of the spontaneous generation hypothesis, yet unwilling to accept the alternative belief in special creation, are left with nothing.

George Wald

Special, Generations, Alternatives

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Begin with dhyana, with meditation, and end in samadhi, in ecstasy, and you will know what God is. It is not a hypothesis, it is an experience. You have to LIVE it - that is the only way to know it.

Rajneesh

Meditation, Dhyana, Way

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This constitution we designate by the word genotype. The word is entirely independent of any hypothesis; it is fact, not hypothesis that different zygotes arising by fertilisation can thereby have different qualities, that, even under quite similar conditions of life, phenotypically diverse individuals can develop.

Wilhelm Johannsen

Independent, Science, Diversity

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If homosexuality is not caused by genetic factors...then that means it can be acquired... And if it can be acquired, shouldn't we be doing everything in our power to protect people from acquiring it? Shouldn't we lean to the side of protecting the children instead of affirming a scientific hypothesis that has no actual truthful foundation?

Scott Lively

Children, Mean, Gay

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What the use of P [the significance level] implies, therefore, is that a hypothesis that may be true may be rejected because it has not predicted observable results that have not occurred.

Harold Jeffreys

Science, Use, Levels

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After a duration of a thousand years, the power of astrology broke down when, with Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, the progress of astronomy overthrew the false hypothesis upon which its entire structure rested, namely, the geocentric system of the universe. ... the earth revolves in space intervened to upset the complicated play of planetary influences, and the silent stars, relegated to the unfathomable depths of the sky, no longer made their prophetic voices audible to mankind.

Franz Cumont

Stars, Science, Years

"Astrology and Religion".

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Characteristically skeptical of the idea that living things would faithfully follow mathematical formulas, [Robert Harper] seized upon factors in corn which seemed to blend in the hybrid-rather than be represented by plus or minus signs, and put several seasons into throwing doubt upon the concept of immutable hypothetical units of inheritance concocted to account for selected results.

Charles Thom

Life, Science, Ideas

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Science, at its core, is simply a method of practical logic that tests hypotheses against experience. Scientism, by contrast, is the worldview and value system that insists that the questions the scientific method can answer are the most important questions human beings can ask, and that the picture of the world yielded by science is a better approximation to reality than any other.

John Michael Greer

Reality, Important, Answers

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From the almost total absence of fossil evidence relative to the origin of the phyla, it follows that any explanation of the mechanism in the creative evolution of the fundamental structural plans is heavily burdened with hypothesis. This should appear as an epigraph to every book on evolution. The lack of direct evidence leads to the formulation of pure conjecture as to the genesis of the phyla; we do not even have a basis to determine the extent to which these opinions are correct.

Pierre-Paul Grasse

Book, Creative, Fossils

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This general tendency to eliminate, by means of unverifiable speculations, the limits of the categories nature presents to us is the inheritance of biology from The Origin of Species. To establish the continuity required by theory, historical arguments are invoked, even though historical evidence is lacking. Thus are engendered those fragile towers of hypothesis based on hypothesis, where fact and fiction intermingle in an inextricable confusion.

W. R. Thompson

Mean, Confusion, Historical

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Taken with the archaeological data, we can say that the old hypothesis of an invasion of people - not merely their language - from the steppe appears to be true.

Spencer Wells

Taken, Data, People

Spencer Wells (2012). “The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey”, p.167, Random House

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My real bottom-line hypothesis is that nobody has a sweet clue what they’re doing. Therefore you better be trying stuff at an insanely rapid pace. You want to be screwing around with nearly everything. Relentless experimentation was probably important in the 1970s-now it’s do or die.

Tom Peters

Sweet, Real, Important

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Faith is the choice of the nobler hypothesis.' Not the noblest, one never knows what that is. But the nobler, the best one can see when the choice is made.

Robert K. Greenleaf

Choices, Made, Knows

Robert K. Greenleaf, Larry C. Spears (2002). “Servant Leadership: A Journey Into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness”, p.38, Paulist Press

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Christian apologists who argue that a story about an empty tomb is convincing evidence of a resurrected body are likely unfamiliar with Occam’s razor, which states that among competing hypotheses, the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions should be selected. They assume that the most likely explanation is miraculous resurrection through some unproven divine connection, but more likely scenarios include a stolen body, a mismarked grave, a planned removal, faulty reports, creative storytelling, edited scriptures, etc. No magic required.

David G. McAfee

Christian, Convincing Evidence, Creative

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With every passing year we discover more evidence to support Darwin's revolutionary hypothesis that the cognitive and emotional lives of animals differ only by degree, from the fishes to the birds to the monkeys to humans.

Roger Fouts

Nature, Animal, Emotional

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We physicists know that a beautiful postulate is more likely to be correct than an ugly one. Why not adopt this Postulate of Eternal Life, at least as a working hypothesis?

Frank J. Tipler

Beautiful, Why Not, Ugly

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