As quoted in "Age of unreason" by Jeannette Baxter in The Guardian (22 June 2004) http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2004/jun/22/sciencefictionfantasyandhorror.jgballard
Context: The notions about the benefits of transgression in my last three novels are not ones I want to see fulfilled. Rather, they are extreme possibilities that may be forced into reality by the suffocating pressures of the conformist world we inhabit. Boredom and a deadening sense of total pointlessness seem to drive a lot of meaningless crimes, from the Hungerford and Columbine shootings to the Dando murder, and there have been dozens of similar crimes in the US and elsewhere over the past 30 years.
These meaningless crimes are much more difficult to explain than the 9/11 attacks, and say far more about the troubled state of the western psyche. My novels offer an extreme hypothesis which future events may disprove — or confirm. They're in the nature of long-range weather forecasts.
“(Coining phrase "null hypothesis") In relation to any experiment we may speak of this hypothesis as the “null hypothesis,” and it should be noted that the null hypothesis is never proved or established, but is possibly disproved, in the course of experimentation. Every experiment may be said to exist only in order to give the facts a chance of disproving the null hypothesis.”
The Design of Experiments, Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1935, p. 18
1930s
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Ronald Fisher 28
English statistician, evolutionary biologist, geneticist, a… 1890–1962Related quotes
Source: The Art of Scientific Investigation (1950), p. 65.
Source: A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God (1908), II
Context: The hypothesis of God is a peculiar one, in that it supposes an infinitely incomprehensible object, although every hypothesis, as such, supposes its object to be truly conceived in the hypothesis. This leaves the hypothesis but one way of understanding itself; namely, as vague yet as true so far as it is definite, and as continually tending to define itself more and more, and without limit. The hypothesis, being thus itself inevitably subject to the law of growth, appears in its vagueness to represent God as so, albeit this is directly contradicted in the hypothesis from its very first phase. But this apparent attribution of growth to God, since it is ineradicable from the hypothesis, cannot, according to the hypothesis, be flatly false. Its implications concerning the Universes will be maintained in the hypothesis, while its implications concerning God will be partly disavowed, and yet held to be less false than their denial would be. Thus the hypothesis will lead to our thinking of features of each Universe as purposed; and this will stand or fall with the hypothesis. Yet a purpose essentially involves growth, and so cannot be attributed to God. Still it will, according to the hypothesis, be less false to speak so than to represent God as purposeless.
Source: A Manual of the Steam Engine and Other Prime Movers (1859), p. 27
Source: "The Scientific Character of Geology," 1961, p. 454; As cited in: Alberta Research Council, Research Council of Alberta (1964), Bulletin - Alberta Research Council. Vol. 15-17, p. 31
As quoted in Nuclear Principles in Engineering (2005) by Tatjana Jevremovic, p. 397
Source: Reinventing Gravity (2008), Chapter 4, Dark Matter, p. 77
Source: God: The Failed Hypothesis (2007), Chapter 4: 'Cosmic Evidence', p.117
p. 82 of How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement? (1969) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Much_Can_We_Boost_IQ_and_Scholastic_Achievement%3F, the invited paper that created much hostility towards Jensen.
“Every explanation is after all an hypothesis.”
Source: 1930s-1951, Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951 (1993), Ch. 7 : Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, p. 123