Hypothesis Quotes - Page 16

• It does not matter who you are, or how smart you are, or what title you have, or how many of you there are, and certainly not how many papers your side has published, if your prediction is wrong then your hypothesis is wrong. Period.

  Richard P. Feynman

  Smart, Your Side, Matter

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• Hypotheses are nets: only he who casts will catch.

  Novalis

  Casts

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• How can you communicate your thoughts or demonstrate your hypotheses by conventional means when all the values and standards that you want to challenge are built into those means? Science and new technology today like to declare that they encourage 'lateral thinking,' new ways of seeing and putting data together - but all systems have an inbuilt resistance to what has not been programmed into them through the premises on which their rules are based.

  Elizabeth Janeway

  Mean, Technology, Thinking

  Elizabeth Janeway (1987). “Improper behavior”, William Morrow

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• When I was younger, I'd get very empirical with myself. "I have a hypothesis about myself. I'll put myself in a situation, see what happens, then I'll draw a conclusion based on the empirical evidence. Hypothesis: I can play basketball." So I'd try. "Conclusion: I cannot play basketball."

  Demetri Martin

  Basketball, Play, Trying

  Interview with Litsa Dremousis, www.believermag.com. February 2006.

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• There is no reason why an extraphysical general principle is necessarily to be avoided, since such principles could conceivably serve as useful working hypotheses. For the history of scientific research is full of examples in which it was very fruitful indeed to assume that certain objects or elements might be real, long before any procedures were known which would permit them to be observed directly.

  David Bohm

  Real, Long, Reason Why

  "A Suggested Interpretation of the Quantum Theory in Terms of 'Hidden' Variables. II". Physical Review, Volume 35, No. 2 (p. 188), January 15, 1952.

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• In science, each new result, sometimes quite surprising, heralds a step forward and allows one to discard some hypotheses, even though one or two of these might have been highly favored.

  Stanley B. Prusiner

  Two, Might, Steps

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• Making every allowance for the errors of the most extreme fallibility, the history of Catholicism would on this hypothesis represent an amount of imposture probably unequaled in the annals of the human race.

  William Edward Hartpole Lecky

  Errors, Race, Atheism

  William Edward Hartpole Lecky (2001). “History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe”, p.178, The Minerva Group, Inc.

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• I have a standing offer of $250,000 to anyone who can give any empirical evidence (scientific proof) for evolution. My $250,000 offer demonstrates that the hypothesis of evolution is nothing more than a religious belief.

  Kent Hovind

  Religious, Giving, Scary

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• Faith is synonymous with working hypothesis.

  William James

  Faith

  William James (1956). “The Will to Believe: And Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, and Human Immortality”, p.95, Courier Corporation

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• Better risk loss of truth than chance of error--that is your faith-vetoer's exact position. He is actively playing his stake as much as the believer is; he is backing the field against the religious hypothesis, just as the believer is backing the religious hypothesis against the field.

  William James

  Faith, Religious, Loss

  William James, John Dewey, John M. Capps, Donald Capps (2005). “James and Dewey on Belief and Experience”, p.107, University of Illinois Press

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• On pragmatistic principles, if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true.

  William James

  God, Principles, Theism

  William James (2012). “Pragmatism”, p.115, Courier Corporation

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• Even if matter could do every outward thing that God does, the idea of it would not work as satisfactorily, because the chief callfor a God on modern men's part is for a being who will inwardly recognize them and judge them sympathetically. Matter disappoints this craving of our ego, so God remains for most men the truer hypothesis, and indeed remains so for definite pragmatic reasons.

  William James

  Men, Ideas, Judging

  William James (2015). “The Meaning of Truth: Human Understanding”, p.72, 谷月社

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• How many thousands of [lives] are there every year that comes cast away, (in all civilized countries at least)--and consider'd asnothing but common air, in competition of an hypothesis.

  Laurence Sterne

  Country, War, Air

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• What doubts, what hypotheses, what labyrinths of amusement, what fields of disputation, what an ocean of false learning, may be avoided by that single notion of immaterialism!

  George Berkeley

  Ocean, Doubt, Labyrinth

  George Berkeley (1871). “The Works of George Berkeley”, p.356

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• To invent without scruple a new principle to every new phenomenon, instead of adapting it to the old; to overload our hypothesis with a variety of this kind, are certain proofs that none of these principles is the just one, and that we only desire, by a number of falsehoods, to cover our ignorance of the truth.

  David Hume

  Truth, Ignorance, Numbers

  David Hume (2003). “A Treatise of Human Nature”, p.201, Courier Corporation

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• Given a conjecture, the best thing is to prove it. The second best thing is to disprove it. The third best thing is to prove that it is not possible to disprove it, since it will tell you not to waste your time trying to disprove it. That's what Gödel did for the Continuum Hypothesis.

  Saharon Shelah

  Science, Trying, Waste

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• We avoid the gravest difficulties when, giving up the attempt to frame hypotheses concerning the constitution of matter, we pursue statistical inquiries as a branch of rational mechanics.

  J. Willard Gibbs

  Giving Up, Inquiry, Branches

  "Elementary Principles in Statististical Mechanics". Book by J. Willard Gibbs (Preface, p. 9), 1902.

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• Mr Hall's hypothesis has its cause for subsidence, but none for the lifting of the thickened sunken crust into mountains. It is a theory for the origin of mountains, with the origin of mountains left out.

  James Dwight Dana

  Mountain, Causes, Theory

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• The wheels and springs of man are all set to the hypothesis of the permanence of nature. We are not built like a ship to be tossed, but like a house to stand.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Change, Nature, Spring

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)”, p.1084, Delphi Classics

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• If there should chance to be any mathematicians who, ignorant in mathematics yet pretending to skill in that science, should dare, upon the authority of some passage of Scripture wrested to their purpose, to condemn and censure my hypothesis, I value them not, and scorn their inconsiderate judgement.
  De Revolutionibus Coelestibus

  Nicolaus Copernicus

  Skills, Judgement, Ignorant

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• This hypothesis (Parallel hypothesis) would not destroy itself at all easily.

  Johann Heinrich Lambert

  Parallels

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• The hypothesis I wish to advance is thatthe language of morality is ingrave disorder.... What we possess, if this is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have--very largely if not entirely--lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.

  Alasdair MacIntyre

  Keys, Expression, Wish

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• A perfect historian must possess an imagination sufficiently powerful to make his narrative affecting and picturesque; yet he must control it so absolutely as to content himself with the materials which he finds, and to refrain from supplying deficiencies by additions of his own. He must be a profound and ingenious reasoner; yet he must possess sufficient self-command to abstain from casting his facts in the mould of his hypothesis.

  Thomas B. Macaulay

  Powerful, Self, Profound

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• If the hypothesis of evolution is true, living matter must have arisen from non-living matter; for by the hypothesis the condition of the globe was at one time such, that living matter could not have existed in it, life being entirely incompatible with the gaseous state.

  Thomas Huxley

  Matter, Evolution, States

  "Biology, with Preludes on Current Events". Book by Joseph Cook, p. 39, 1878.

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• We shall do better to abandon the whole attempt to learn the truthunless we can trust to the human mind's having such a powerof guessing right that before very many hypotheses shall have been tried, intelligent guessing may be expected to lead us to one which will support all tests, leaving the vast majority of possible hypotheses unexamined.

  Charles Sanders Peirce

  Science, Intelligent, Support

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