#speculation

I know there's a great deal of speculation, and while I appreciate the interest, kind of, my contract ends in May and I'm trying to figure out what I'm going to do. I'm fortunate to have a couple of opportunities to think long and hard about. ↗

— Katie Couric

#appreciate #contract #couple #deal #ends

In spite of the haze of speculation, it is still something of a shock to find myself here, coming to terms with an enormous trust placed in my hands and with the inevitable sense of inadequacy that goes with that. ↗

— Rowan Williams

#enormous #find #goes #hands #haze

There was a long history of speculation that in quantum gravity, unlike Einstein's classical theory, it might be possible for the topology of spacetime to change. ↗

— Edward Witten

#classical #einstein #gravity #history #long

When we come to images or memories or thoughts, speculation, while always closely related to practice, is more explicit, and it is in fact not immediately obvious that such processes can be described in any sense as practical. ↗

— Samuel Alexander

#any #closely #come #described #explicit

What is faith but a kind of betting or speculation after all? It should be, I bet that my Redeemer liveth. ↗

— Samuel Butler

#bet #betting #faith #i #kind

Time destroys the speculation of men, but it confirms nature. ↗

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

#confirms #destroys #nature #speculation #time

The one thing that's absolutely clear is that Karl was not the source for the leak and there's no basis for any additional speculation. ↗

— Robert Luskin

#additional #any #basis #clear #karl

In science's pecking order, evolutionary biology lurks somewhere near the bottom, far closer to phrenology than to physics. For evolutionary biology is a historical science, laden with history's inevitable imponderables. We evolutionary biologists cannot generate a Cretaceous Park to observe exactly what killed the dinosaurs; and, unlike "harder" scientists, we usually cannot resolve issues with a simple experiment, such as adding tube A to tube B and noting the color of the mixture. ↗

— Jerry A. Coyne

#confessions-of-the-darwinists #conjecture #darwin #darwinism #darwinist-confessions

A wonderful area for speculative academic work is the unknowable. These days religious subjects are in disfavor, but there are still plenty of good topics. The nature of consciousness, the workings of the brain, the origin of aggression, the origin of language, the origin of life on earth, SETI and life on other worlds...this is all great stuff. Wonderful stuff. You can argue it interminably. But it can't be contradicted, because nobody knows the answer to any of these topics. ↗

— Michael Crichton

#brain #conjecture #consciousness #darwinism #evolution

To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I confess, absurd in the highest degree...The difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection , though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered subversive of the theory. ↗

— Charles Darwin

#confessions-of-the-darwinists #conjecture #darwin #darwinism #darwinist-confessions