
“We consider it a good principle to explain the phenomena by the simplest hypothesis possible.”
Book III, sec 1 (trans. Gerald J. Toomer)
Almagest
A collection of quotes on the topic of hypothesis, use, other, theory.
“We consider it a good principle to explain the phenomena by the simplest hypothesis possible.”
Book III, sec 1 (trans. Gerald J. Toomer)
Almagest
In the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Ninth edition, (1876) Vol. III, "Biology", p. 689.
Also quoted in Joseph Cook (1878), Biology, with Preludes on Current Events, Houghton, Osgood, p. 39
1870s
As quoted in Nuclear Principles in Engineering (2005) by Tatjana Jevremovic, p. 397
1860s, On a Piece of Chalk (1868)
Source: A Brief History of Time (1988), Ch. 1
Context: Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis: you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory. On the other hand, you can disprove a theory by finding even a single observation that disagrees with the predictions of the theory. As philosopher of science Karl Popper has emphasized, a good theory is characterized by the fact that it makes a number of predictions that could in principle be disproved or falsified by observation. Each time new experiments are observed to agree with the predictions the theory survives, and our confidence in it is increased; but if ever a new observation is found to disagree, we have to abandon or modify the theory.
Source: The Foundations of Normal and Abnormal Psychology (1914), p. 86
Where is science going? The Universe in the light of modern physics. (1932)
Royal Institution Lecture (April 30, 1897) as quoted by Edmund Taylor Whittaker, A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity from the Age of Descartes to the Close of the Nineteenth Century http://books.google.com/books?id=CGJDAAAAIAAJ (1910).
Quotes eat me
in Charlie Rose Science Series: The Imperative of Science http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/9027 with Paul Nurse, President of Rockefeller University, Harold Varmus, president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Shirley Ann Jackson, President of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Bruce Alberts, Editor-In-Chief of Science and Lisa Randall of Harvard University.
BBC radio broadcast, March 28, 1949. http://www.joh.cam.ac.uk/library/special_collections/hoyle/exhibition/radio/ Reprinted in April 1949 in The Listener, a BBC magazine.
“Think of a hypothesis as a card. A theory is a house made of hypotheses.”
Attributed in Proceedings of the Twenty-fifth Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (1991)
Letter to Ignatius Pardies (1672) Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (Feb. 1671/2) as quoted by William L. Harper, Isaac Newton's Scientific Method: Turning Data Into Evidence about Gravity and Cosmology (2011)
Conversations with Žižek by Slavoj Žižek and Glyn Daly (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), p. 45
"Rational expectations and the dynamics of hyperinflation." 1973
Variant translation: I hold that the Sun is located at the centre of the revolutions of the heavenly orbs and does not change place, and that the Earth rotates on itself and moves around it. Moreover … I confirm this view not only by refuting Ptolemy's and Aristotle's arguments, but also by producing many for the other side, especially some pertaining to physical effects whose causes perhaps cannot be determined in any other way, and other astronomical discoveries; these discoveries clearly confute the Ptolemaic system, and they agree admirably with this other position and confirm it.
Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina (1615)
Letter to Woodburn Harris (25 February-1 March 1929), in Selected Letters II, 1925-1929 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, pp. 287-288
Non-Fiction, Letters
“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
Quoted in Mathematical Mysteries : The Beauty and Magic of Numbers (1999) by Calvin C. Clawson, p. 258
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.
"The Holy Dimension", p. 337.
Heschel made similar statements in earlier writings: The great insight is not attained when we ponder or infer the beyond from the here. In the realm of the ineffable, God is not a hypothesis derived from logical assumptions, but an immediate insight, self-evident as light. He is not something to be sought in the darkness with the light of reason. He is the light.
Man Is Not Alone : A Philosophy of Religion (1951)
Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)
Context: In the realm of faith, God is not a hypothesis derived from logical assumptions, but an immediate insight, self-evident as light. To rationalists He is something after which they seek in the darkness with the light of their reason. To men of faith He is the light.
He here refers to his proposal in "A unitary hypothesis of mind-brain interaction in the cerebral cortex" (1990); published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B 240, p. 433 - 451
How the Self Controls Its Brain (1994)
Context: The hypothesis has been proposed that all mental events and experiences, in fact the whole of the outer and inner sensory experiences, are a composite of elemental or unitary mental experiences at all levels of intensity. Each of these mental units is reciprocally linked in some unitary manner to a dendron … Appropriately we name these proposed mental units 'psychons.' Psychons are not perceptual paths to experiences. They are the experiences in all their diversity and uniqueness. There could be millions of psychons each linked uniquely to the millions of dendrons. It is hypothesized that it is the very nature of psychons to link together in providing a unified experience.
Ancient Medicine
Context: Whoever having undertaken to speak or write on Medicine, have first laid down for themselves some hypothesis to their argument, such as hot, or cold, or moist, or dry, or whatever else they choose, (thus reducing their subject within a narrow compass, and supposing only one or two original causes of diseases or of death among mankind,) are all clearly mistaken in much that they say; and this is the more reprehensible as relating to an art which all men avail themselves of on the most important occasions... For there are practitioners, some bad and some far otherwise, which, if there had been no such thing as Medicine, and if nothing had been investigated or found out in it... all would have been equally unskilled and ignorant of it, and everything concerning the sick would have been directed by chance. But now it is not so; for, as in all the other arts, those who practise them differ much from one another in dexterity and knowledge, so is it in like manner with Medicine. Wherefore I have not thought that it stood in need of an empty hypothesis, like those subjects which are occult and dubious... as, for example, with regard to things above us [meteorology, astronomy or astrology] and things below the earth [geology, Hades, ]; if any one should treat of these and undertake to declare how they are constituted, the reader or hearer could not find out, whether what is delivered be true or false; for there is nothing which can be referred to in order to discover the truth.<!--pp. 161-162
The New Divinity (1964)
Context: God is a hypothesis constructed by man to help him understand what existence is all about.... To say that God is ultimate reality is just semantic cheating, as well as being so vague as to become effectively meaningless... Today the god hypothesis has ceased to be scientifically tenable, has lost its explanatory value and is becoming an intellectual and moral burden to our thought. It no longer convinces or comforts, and its abandonment often brings a deep sense of relief. Many people assert that this abandonment of the god hypothesis means the abandonment of all religion and all moral sanctions. This is simply not true. But it does mean, once our relief at jettisoning an outdated piece of ideological furniture is over, that we must construct some thing to take its place.
Introduction
The Philosophy of Misery (1846)
Context: Tormented by conflicting feelings, I appealed to reason; and it is reason which, amid so many dogmatic contradictions, now forces the hypothesis upon me. A priori dogmatism, applying itself to God, has proved fruitless: who knows whither the hypothesis, in its turn, will lead us?
I will explain therefore how, studying in the silence of my heart, and far from every human consideration, the mystery of social revolutions, God, the great unknown, has become for me an hypothesis, — I mean a necessary dialectical tool.
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.
The Analysis of Mind (1921), Lecture IX: Memory, p. 159
1920s
Context: There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that "remembered" a wholly unreal past. There is no logically necessary connection between events at different times; therefore nothing that is happening now or will happen in the future can disprove the hypothesis that the world began five minutes ago.
Ancient Medicine
Context: Whoever having undertaken to speak or write on Medicine, have first laid down for themselves some hypothesis to their argument, such as hot, or cold, or moist, or dry, or whatever else they choose, (thus reducing their subject within a narrow compass, and supposing only one or two original causes of diseases or of death among mankind,) are all clearly mistaken in much that they say; and this is the more reprehensible as relating to an art which all men avail themselves of on the most important occasions... For there are practitioners, some bad and some far otherwise, which, if there had been no such thing as Medicine, and if nothing had been investigated or found out in it... all would have been equally unskilled and ignorant of it, and everything concerning the sick would have been directed by chance. But now it is not so; for, as in all the other arts, those who practise them differ much from one another in dexterity and knowledge, so is it in like manner with Medicine. Wherefore I have not thought that it stood in need of an empty hypothesis, like those subjects which are occult and dubious... as, for example, with regard to things above us [meteorology, astronomy or astrology] and things below the earth [geology, Hades, ]; if any one should treat of these and undertake to declare how they are constituted, the reader or hearer could not find out, whether what is delivered be true or false; for there is nothing which can be referred to in order to discover the truth.<!--pp. 161-162
Part IV, Chapter V
Les voix du silence [Voices of Silence] (1951)
Heaven and Earth (2009)
p, 125
On the Sizes and Distances of the Sun and the Moon (c. 250 BC)
1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Prophet
Source: Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (1986), p. 69, 77, 358
Source: 1860s, Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863), Ch.2, p. 128
Source: Debunking Economics - The Naked Emperor Of The Social Sciences (2001), Chapter 11, Finance And Economic Breakdown, p. 243
Richard Cyert, James G. March, William H. Starbuck. (1961) "Two experiments on bias and conflict in organisational estimation," Management Science, 254–64; Abstract
Richard Cyert, James G. March, William H. Starbuck. (1961) "Two experiments on bias and conflict in organisational estimation," Management Science, 254–64; Abstract
Source: The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man (1863), Ch.21, p. 422
Letter to John Adams, 5 May 1817, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (Lipscomb-Bergh edition, 1903), Volume XV, p. 109
1810s
Origins Reconsidered: In Search of What Makes Us Human (1992)
Letter to A.L. Bowley, 27 February 1906, cited in: David L. Sills, Robert King Merton, Social Science Quotations: Who Said What, When, and Where http://books.google.com/books?id=WIKQbew5YKcC&pg=PA151 Transaction Publishers, 2000. p. 151.
My Life and Confessions, for Philippine, 1786
“The great tragedy of Science — the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.”
Presidential Address at the British Association, "Biogenesis and abiogenesis" (1870) http://aleph0.clarku.edu/huxley/CE8/B-Ab.html; later published in Collected Essays, Vol. 8, p. 229
1870s
“I accept nothing on authority. A hypothesis must be backed by reason, or else it is worthless.”
“Reason”, p. 52
I, Robot (1950)
Introduction
Higher Mathematics for Chemical Students (1911)
No. 50
On the Interpretation of Nature (1753)
New millennium, An Enjoyable Life Puzzling Over Modern Finance Theory, 2009
Handbook of Rational Pathology, 1846-1853
"A perspective on the landscape problem" arXiv (Feb 15, 2012)
Evolution of living organisms: evidence for a new theory of transformation (1977)
BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/politics_show/regions/yorkshire_and_lincolnshire/8298649.stm
I Want to be a Mathematician: An Automathography (1985)
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
“The atomic hypothesis which had worked so splendidly in Physics breaks down in Psychics.”
"Francis Ysidro Edgeworth", p. 286; Originally published in The Economic Journal, March 1926
Ref: en.wikiquote.org - John Maynard Keynes / Quotes / Essays In Biography (1933)
Essays In Biography (1933), Francis Ysidro Edgeworth
[Michael Atiyah, Collected Works: Michael Atiyah Collected Works: Volume 1: Early Papers; General Papers, http://books.google.com/books?id=YJ0cZwxLECAC&pg=PA250, 28 April 1988, Clarendon Press, 978-0-19-853275-0, 250]
Source: The Emergence Of Probability, 1975, Chapter 4, Evidence, p. 36.
Source: A Manual of the Steam Engine and Other Prime Movers (1859), p. 31
The System of the World (1800)
“Although to penetrate into the intimate mysteries of nature and thence to learn the true causes of phenomena is not allowed to us, nevertheless it can happen that a certain fictive hypothesis may suffice for explaining many phenomena.”
Quanquam nobis in intima naturae mysteria penetrare, indeque veras caussas Phaenomenorum agnoscere neutiquam est concessum: tamen evenire potest, ut hypothesis quaedam ficta pluribus phaenomenis explicandis aeque satisfaciat, ac si vera caussa nobis esset perspecta.
§1
A conjecture about the nature of air (1780)
Rose Rosengard Subotnik (1987). "On grounding Chopin", Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance, and Reception. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521379776.
The Edge Annual Question — 2006: WHAT IS YOUR DANGEROUS IDEA? http://www.edge.org/q2006/q06_6.html#harris
“Values and justice”, Journal of Economic Methodology, Vol. 19, No. 2, June 2012, 101–108
2010s, “Values and Justice”, 2012
Source: "Entrepreneurship: Productive, unproductive, and destructive," 1996, p. 3
The Astonishing Hypothesis (1994)
Alfred Marshall Mayer, Lecture-notes on Physics (1868) Part 1 https://books.google.com/books?id=hqsLAAAAYAAJ
Source: Mind and Nature, a necessary unity, 1988, p. 27
Tjalling Koopmans in: Review of economics and statistics, Vol. 31 -(1949), p. 87
The Development Hypothesis (1852)
John Maxson Stillman, The Story of Alchemy and Early Chemistry (1924)
Pop Internationalism (1996), Competitiveness: A Dangerous Obsession (1994)
Source: Computer Science as Empirical Inquiry: Symbols and Search (1975), p. 116. This is also called the Church–Turing thesis.
"The Face of Miranda", p. 496
Bully for Brontosaurus (1991)