Hypothesis Quotes - Page 5

Hypotheses are only the pieces of scaffolding which are erected round a building during the course of construction, and which are taken away as soon as the edifice is completed.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Taken, Pieces, Construction

11 Copy quote
Do not say hypothesis, and even less theory: say way of thinking.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

Science, Thinking, Way

5 Copy quote
An electron is no more (and no less) hypothetical than a star. Nowadays we count electrons one by one in a Geiger counter, as we count the stars one by one on a photographic plate.

Arthur Eddington

Stars, Science, Plates

Arthur Eddington (2012). “New Pathways in Science: Messenger Lectures (1934)”, p.21, Cambridge University Press

4 Copy quote

Show source
For the Members of the Assembly having before their eyes so many fatal Instances of the errors and falshoods, in which the greatest part of mankind has so long wandred, because they rely'd upon the strength of humane Reason alone, have begun anew to correct all Hypotheses by sense, as Seamen do their dead Reckonings by Cœlestial Observations; and to this purpose it has been their principal indeavour to enlarge and strengthen the Senses by Medicine, and by such outward Instruments as are proper for their particular works.

Robert Hooke

Eye, Science, Medicine

37 Copy quote
Given any rule, however "fundamental" or "necessary" for science, there are always circumstances when it is advisable not only to ignore the rule, but to adopt its opposite. For example, there are circumstances when it is advisable to introduce, elaborate and defend ad hoc hypotheses, or hypotheses which contradict well-established and generally accepted experimental results, or hypotheses whose content is smaller than the content of the existing and empirically adequate alternative, or self-inconsistent hypotheses, and so on.

Paul Feyerabend

Science, Opposites, Self

"Against Method". Book by Paul Feyerabend, 1975.

4 Copy quote

Show source
Hypotheses are the scaffolds which are erected in front of a building and removedd when the building is completed. They are indispensable to the worker; but the worker must not mistake the scaffolding for the building.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Mistake, Science, Building

4 Copy quote
If we respect students abilities to define their own experiences, to generate their own hypotheses, and to discover new ways of categorizing the world, we might not be so quick to evaluate the adequacy of their answers. We might, instead, begin listening to their questions. Out of the questions of students come some of the most creative ideas and discoveries.

Ellen Langer

Discovery, Ideas, Creative

12 Copy quote
The results serve to disprove the tetranucleotide hypothesis. It is, however, noteworthy-whether this is more than accidental, cannot yet be said-that in all desoxypentose nucleic acids examined thus far the molar ratios of total purines to total pyrimidines, and also of adenine to thymine and of guanine to cytosine, were not far from 1.

Erwin Chargaff

Dna, Ratios, Acid

Erwin Chargaff (1978). “Heraclitean Fire: Sketches from a Life Before Nature”, p.93, Paul & Company Pub Consortium

12 Copy quote

Show source
Her professors were astonished by her leaps of thought, by the finesse and elegance of her insights. She arrived at hypotheses by sheer intuition and with what eventually one of her mentors described as an almost alarming speed; she was like a dancer, he said, out in the cosmos springing weightlessly from star to star. Drones, merely brilliant, crawled along behind with laborious proofs that supported her assertions.

Deborah Eisenberg

Stars, Dancer, Intuition

Deborah Eisenberg (2016). “Twilight of the Superheroes”, p.36, Pan Macmillan

8 Copy quote

Show source
Religion, after all, is nothing but an hypothesis framed to account for what is evidentially unaccounted for.

H. L. Mencken

Framed, Accounts

"The American Mercury" Magazine, February 1926.

4 Copy quote

Show source
I think philosophers can do things akin to theoretical scientists, in that, having read about empirical data, they too can think of what hypotheses and theories might account for that data. So there's a continuity between philosophy and science in that way.

Robert Nozick

Philosophy, Thinking, Data

8 Copy quote
To Napoleon on why his works on celestial mechanics make no mention of God: Your Highness, I have no need of this hypothesis.

Pierre-Simon Laplace

Needs, Mechanic, Celestial

37 Copy quote
People who live in states have as a rule never experienced the state of nature and vice-versa, and have no practical possibility of moving from the one to the other ... On what grounds, then, do people form hypotheses about the relative merits of state and state of nature? ... My contention here is that preferences for political arrangements of society are to a large extent produced by these very arrangements, so that political institutions are either addictive like some drugs, or allergy-inducing like some others, or both, for they may be one thing for some people and the other for others.

Anthony de Jasay

Moving, Government, People

8 Copy quote
I tell you what you’ll never really know: all the medical hypothesis that explained my brain will never be as true as these struck leaves letting go.

Anne Sexton

Letting Go, Brain, Medical

Anne Sexton, Diane Wood Middlebrook, Diana Hume George (2000). “Selected Poems of Anne Sexton”, p.28, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

5 Copy quote

Show source
Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs. Fourier's and Bellamy's and Morris's Utopias should all be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torment, what except a specifical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain?

William James

Lonely, Independent, Science

William James (2012). “The Will to Believe and Human Immortality”, p.133, Courier Corporation

4 Copy quote

Show source
In fact, whenever energy is transmitted from one body to another in time, there must be a medium or substance in which the energy exists after it leaves one body and before it reaches the other ... and if we admit this medium as an hypothesis, I think it ought to occupy a prominent place in our investigations, and that we ought to endeavour to construct a mental representation of all the details of its action, and this has been my constant aim in this treatise.

James Clerk Maxwell

Science, Thinking, Details

13 Copy quote
A failed structure provides a counterexample to a hypothesis and shows us incontrovertibly what cannot be done, while a structure that stands without incident often conceals whatever lessons or caveats it might hold for the next generation of engineers.

Henry Petroski

Engineering, Generations, Done

10 Copy quote
That's what I'm trying to get over: the idea that anarchism offers a description of equitable relations that go way back rather than a hypothesis of what the future should look like.

Rebecca Solnit

Ideas, Trying, Looks

Source: www.guernicamag.com

4 Copy quote

Show source
The theory, hypothesis, framework, or background knowledge held by an investigator can strongly influence what is observed.

Norwood Russell Hanson

Objectivity, Subjectivity, Influence

7 Copy quote
The art of discovering the causes of phenomena, or true hypotheses, is like the art of deciphering, in which an ingenious conjecture often greatly shortens the road.

Gottfried Leibniz

Art, Math, Causes

"New Essays Concerning Human Understanding with an Appealing". Transtated from the Original Latin, French and German Writeen,

18 Copy quote

Show source
Are not all Hypotheses erroneous, in which Light is supposed to consist in Pression or Motion, propagated through a fluid Medium? For in all these Hypotheses the Phaenomena of Light have been hitherto explain'd by supposing that they arise from new Modifications of the Rays; which is an erroneous Supposition.

Isaac Newton

Science, Light, Supposing That

Isaac Newton (2007). “Opticks: Or a Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections and Colours of Light”, p.362, Cosimo, Inc.

8 Copy quote

Show source
It seems a miracle that young children easily learn the language of any environment into which they were born. The generative approach to grammar, pioneered by Chomsky, argues that this is only explicable if certain deep, universal features of this competence are innate characteristics of the human brain. Biologically speaking, this hypothesis of an inheritable capability to learn any language means that it must somehow be encoded in the DNA of our chromosomes. Should this hypothesis one day be verified, then lingusitics would become a branch of biology.

Niels Kaj Jerne

Children, Mean, Science

8 Copy quote
During the last two centuries and a half, physical knowledge has been gradually made to rest upon a basis which it had not before. It has become mathematical. The question now is, not whether this or that hypothesis is better or worse to the pure thought, but whether it accords with observed phenomena in those consequences which can be shown necessarily to follow from it, if it be true

Augustus De Morgan

Knowledge, Science, Two

Augustus De Morgan (1872). “A Budget of Paradoxes Reprinted, with the Author's Additions, from the Athenaeum Augustus De Morgan”, p.2

7 Copy quote

Show source
History, human or geological, represents our hypothesis, couched in terms of past events, devised to explain our present-day observations.

M. King Hubbert

Science, Past, History

9 Copy quote
Many 'hard' scientists regard the term 'social science' as an oxymoron. Science means hypotheses you can test, and prove or disprove. Social science is little more than observation putting on airs.

Michael Kinsley

Mean, Science, Air

16 Copy quote