#theories

You make observations, write theories to fit them, try experiments to disprove the theories and, if you can't, you've got something. ↗

— Kary Mullis

#experiments #fit #got #make #observations

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left. ↗

— Alexander Pope

#been #contains #left #like #object

What if one were to want to hunt for these hidden presences? You can’t just rummage around like you’re at a yard sale. You have to listen. You have to pay attention. There are certain things you can’t look at directly. You need to trick them into revealing themselves. That’s what we’re doing with Walter, Jaz. We’re juxtaposing things, listening for echoes. It’s not some silly cybernetic dream of command and control, modeling the whole world so you can predict the outcome. It’s certainly not a theory of everything. I don’t have a theory of any kind. What I have is far more profound.’ ‘What’s that?’ ‘A sense of humor.’ Jaz looked at him, trying to find a clue in his gaunt face, in the clear gray eyes watching him with such - what? Amusement? Condescension? There was something about the man which brought on a sort of hermeneutic despair. He was a forest of signs. ‘We’re hunting for jokes.’ Bachman spoke slowly, as if to a child. ‘Parapraxes. Cosmic slips of the tongue. They’re the key to the locked door. They’ll help us discover it.’ ‘Discover what?’ ‘The face of God. What else would we be looking for? ↗

— Hari Kunzru

#mathematical-models #philosophy #theories #dreams

You come to nature with all her theories, and she knocks them all flat. ↗

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

#theories #nature

The mentally disturbed do not employ the Principle of Scientific Parsimony: the most simple theory to explain a given set of facts. They shoot for the baroque. ↗

— Philip K. Dick

#mentally-disturbed #religion #science #religion

Theories of love are found in the works of scientists, philosophers, and theologians. ↗

— Mortimer Adler

#love #philosophers #scientists #theologians #theories

The progress of science is strewn, like an ancient desert trail, with the bleached skeleton of discarded theories which once seemed to possess eternal life. ↗

— Arthur Koestler

#bleached #desert #discarded #eternal #eternal life

The system becomes more coherent as it is further extended. The elements which we require for explaining a new class of facts are already contained in our system. In false theories, the contrary is the case. ↗

— William Whewell

#becomes #case #class #coherent #contained

From a letter to Barrett H.Clark, 4 May 1918(LL,II,pp.204-5): "my attitude to subjects and expressions, the angles of vision, my methods of composition will, within limits, be always changing--not because I am unstable or unpricipled but because I am free. Or perhaps it may be more exact to say, because I am always trying for freedom--within my limits...A work of art is seldom limited to one exclusive meaning and not necessarily tending to a definite conclusion. And this for the reason that the nearer it approaches art, the more it acquires a symbolic character. ↗

— Joseph Conrad

#art

Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities. ↗

— Thomas Sowell

#competing #curiosities #divorced #facts #isolated