“It was only a hypothesis, but it made an uncomfortable amount of sense.”
Genevieve Cogman (1972) novelist and game designer
Source: The Masked City (2015), Chapter 12 (p. 156)
“There are two possible outcomes: if the result confirms the hypothesis, then you've made a measurement. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you've made a discovery.”
As quoted in Nuclear Principles in Engineering (2005) by Tatjana Jevremovic, p. 397
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Enrico Fermi9
Italian physicist 1901–1954Related quotes
“Think of a hypothesis as a card. A theory is a house made of hypotheses.”
Marilyn vos Savant (1946) US American magazine columnist, author and lecturer
Attributed in Proceedings of the Twenty-fifth Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (1991)
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist
Essay Do We Survive Death? (1936)
1930s
Context: It is only when we think abstractly that we have such a high opinion of man. Of men in the concrete, most of us think the vast majority very bad. Civilized states spend more than half their revenue on killing each other's citizens. Consider the long history of the activities inspired by moral fervour: human sacrifices, persecutions of heretics, witch-hunts, pogroms leading up to wholesale extermination by poison gases … Are these abominations, and the ethical doctrines by which they are prompted, really evidence of an intelligent Creator? And can we really wish that the men who practised them should live for ever? The world in which we live can be understood as a result of muddle and accident; but if it is the outcome of a deliberate purpose, the purpose must have been that of a fiend. For my part, I find accident a less painful and more plausible hypothesis.
“This tends to confirm the hypothesis that all are composed of stars more or less remote.”
William Herschel (1738–1822) German-born British astronomer, technical expert, and composer
Source: Sir William Herschel: His Life and Works (1880), Ch.4 "Life and Works"
Context: Nebulæ can be selected so that an insensible gradation shall take place from a coarse cluster like the Pleiades down to a milky nebulosity like that in Orion, every intermediate step being represented. This tends to confirm the hypothesis that all are composed of stars more or less remote.
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature
Ian Plimer book Heaven and Earth
Heaven and Earth (2009)
Ronald Fisher book The Design of Experiments
The Design of Experiments, Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1935, p. 18
1930s
Ludwig Wittgenstein book On Certainty
On Certainty (1969)
Context: 105. All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system. And this system is not a more or less arbitrary and doubtful point of departure for all our arguments; no it belongs to the essence of what we call an argument. The system is not so much the point of departure, as the element in which our arguments have their life.
