Hypothesis Quotes - Page 9

• [The] first postulate of the Principle of Uniformity, namely, that the laws of nature are invariant with time, is not peculiar to that principle or to geology, but is a common denominator of all science. In fact, instead of being an assumption or an ad hoc hypothesis, it is simply a succinct summation of the totality of all experimental and observational evidence.

  M. King Hubbert

  Science, Law, Principles

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• In geology we cannot dispense with conjectures: [but] because we are condemned to dream let us ensure that our dreams are like those of sane men-e.g. that they have their foundations in truth-and are not like the dreams of the sick, formed by strange combinations of phantasms, contrary to nature and therefore incredible.

  Scipione Breislak

  Dream, Science, Men

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• For it is the duty of an astronomer to compose the history of the celestial motions or hypotheses about them. Since he cannot in any certain way attain to the true causes, he will adopt whatever suppositions enable the motions to be computed correctly from the principles of geometry for the future as well as for the past.

  Andreas Osiander

  Future, Science, Past

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• Beware of the problem of testing too many hypotheses; the more you torture the data, the more likely they are to confess, but confessions obtained under duress may not be admissible in the court of scientific opinion.

  Stephen Stigler

  Science, Data, May

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• 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

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• The knowledge of Natural-History, being Observation of Matters of Fact, is more certain than most others, and in my slender Opinion, less subject to Mistakes than Reasonings, Hypotheses, and Deductions are; ... These are things we are sure of, so far as our Senses are not fallible; and which, in probability, have been ever since the Creation, and will remain to the End of the World, in the same Condition we now find them.

  Hans Sloane

  Mistake, Knowledge, Science

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• 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

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• One-dimensional thought is systematically promoted by the makers of politics and their purveyors of mass information. Their universe of discourse is populated by self-validating hypotheses which, incessantly and monopolistically repeated, become hyponotic definitions of dictations.

  Herbert Marcuse

  Self, Definitions, Information

  Herbert Marcuse (2013). “One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society”, p.16, Routledge

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• Some of us still get all weepy when we think about the Gaia Hypothesis, the idea that earth is a big furry goddess-creature who resembles everybody's mom in that she knows what's best for us. But if you look at the historical record - Krakatoa, Mt. Vesuvius, Hurricane Charley, poison ivy, and so forth down the ages - you have to ask yourself: Whose side is she on, anyway?

  Barbara Ehrenreich

  God, Mom, Thinking

  Barbara Ehrenreich (1990). “WORST YEARS OF OUR LIVES”, Pantheon

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• There is no doubt in my mind that the literature on climate change overwhelmingly supports the hypothesis that climate change is caused by humans. I have very little reason to doubt that the consensus is indeed correct.

  Richard Tol

  Support, Mind, Doubt

  "Climate contrarians accidentally confirm the 97% global warming consensus" by Dana Nuccitelli, www.theguardian.com. June 5, 2014.

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• Dream analysis stands or falls with [the hypothesis of the unconscious]. Without it the dream appears to be merely a freak of nature, a meaningless conglomerate of memory-fragments left over from the happenings of the day.

  Carl Jung

  Dream, Memories, Fall

  Carl Gustav Jung (2001). “Modern Man in Search of a Soul”, p.2, Psychology Press

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• The fact that all normal children acquire essentially comparable grammars of great complexity with remarkable rapidity suggests that human beings are somehow specially designed to do this, with data-handling or 'hypothesis-formulating' ability of unknown character and complexity.

  Noam Chomsky

  Children, Character, Data

  Andrea Moro, Noam Chomsky, Ivano Caponigro, Daniel B. Kane (2015). “The Boundaries of Babel: The Brain and the Enigma of Impossible Languages”, p.37, MIT Press

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• I believe in clear-cut positions. I think that the most arrogant position is this apparent, multidisciplinary modesty of "what I am saying now is not unconditional, it is just a hypothesis," and so on. It really is a most arrogant position. I think that the only way to be honest and expose yourself to criticism is to state clearly and dogmatically where you are. You must take the risk and have a position.

  Slavoj Žižek

  Believe, Commitment, Cutting

  "Conversations with Žižek". Book by Slavoj Žižek and Glyn Daly, 2004.

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• The earliest signs of living things, announcing as they do a high complexity of organization, entirely exclude the hypothesis of a transmutation from lower to higher grades of being. The first fiat of Creation which went forth, doubtlessly ensured the perfect adaptation of animals to the surrounding media; and thus, whilst the geologist recognizes a beginning, he can see in the innumerable facts of the eye of the earliest crustacean, the same evidences of Omniscience as in the completion of the vertebrate form.

  Roderick Murchison

  Eye, Science, Animal

  Roderick Impey Murchison (1854). “Siluria the History of the Oldest Known Rocks Containing Organic Remains, with a Brief Sketch of the Distribution of Gold Over the Earth by Roderick Impey Murchison”, p.469

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• Hitherto, no rival hypothesis has been proposed as a substitute for the doctrine of transmutation; for 'independent creation,' as it is often termed, or the direct intervention of the Supreme Cause, must simply be considered as an avowal that we deem the question to lie beyond the domain of science.

  Charles Lyell

  Lying, Independent, Science

  Charles Lyell (1863). “The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man with Remarks on Theories of the Origin of Species by Variation by Charles Lyell”, p.421

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• There is the theory that all the living forms in the world have arisen from a single source which itself came from an inorganic form. This theory can be called the 'general theory of evolution,' and the evidence which supports this is not sufficiently strong to allow us to consider it as anything more than a working hypothesis.

  Gerald A. Kerkut

  Strong, Theory Of Evolution, Support

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• The physicist can never subject an isolated hypothesis to experimental test, but only a whole group of hypotheses.

  Pierre Duhem

  Science, Groups, Tests

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• We can make a similar examination, but with greater uncertainty, of the extraterrestrial hypothesis that holds that a wide range of UFOs viewed on the planet Earth are space vehicles from planets of other stars.

  Carl Sagan

  Stars, Space, Earth

  Carl Sagan (1973). “Carl Sagan's Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective”, p.200, Cambridge University Press

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• It isn't that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history's meaning.

  Philip Roth

  Ideas, History, Stories

  Philip Roth (1989). “The facts: a novelist's autobiography”, Vintage

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• The most superior of scientific goals is to embrace a maximum of experiment with a minimum of hypotheses.

  Albert Einstein

  Goal, Embrace, Minimum

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• Science offers us an explanation of how complexity (the difficult) arose out of simplicity (the easy). The hypothesis of God offers no worthwhile explanation for anything, for it simply postulates what we are trying to explain. It postulates the difficult to explain, and leaves it at that.

  Richard Dawkins

  Simplicity, Trying, Easy

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• Testosterone Poisoning: … Until now it has been thought that the level of testosterone in men is normal simply because they have it. But if you consider how abnormal their behavior is, then you are led to the hypothesis that almost all men are suffering from ‘testosterone poisoning.’

  Alan Alda

  Men, Suffering, Abnormal

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• 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

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• 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

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• If nature leads us to mathematical forms of great simplicity and beauty - by forms I am referring to coherent systems of hypothesis, axioms, etc. - to forms that no one has previously encountered, we cannot help thinking that they are "true," that they reveal a genuine feature of nature... You must have felt this too: The almost frightening simplicity and wholeness of relationships which nature suddenly spreads out before us and for which none of us was in the least prepared.

  Werner Heisenberg

  Thinking, Simplicity, Etc

  "Bittersweet Destiny: The Stormy Evolution of Human Behavior". Book by Del Thiessen, 1995.

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