Theory Quotations | Page 3

In order to displace a prevailing theory or paradigm in science, it is not enough to merely point out what it cannot explain; you have to offer a new theory that explains more data, and do so in a testable way.

I operate under the theory that all publicity is good publicity, and then, if that theory doesn't work, you just say that any newspaper article ends up on the bottom of the parrot cage. But, of course, you can't line a parrot cage with Internet bloggers, can you?

I wanted to make noise, not study theory.

A lot of my role is advocacy, and as a scientist, you're an advocate, too, because you are coming up with a theory and having to convince your fellow scientists that you're right.

Very much, string theory is simply a work in progress. What we are inching toward every day are predictions that within the realm of current technology we hope to test. It's not like we're working on a theory that is permanently beyond experiment. That would be philosophy.

You can't run a business or anything else on a theory.

Theories are always very thin and insubstantial, experience only is tangible.

Our theory is, if you need the user to tell you what you're selling, then you don't know what you're selling, and it's probably not going to be a good experience.

I wanted a theory that would allow one to live outside the office with the same philosophy one uses inside it.

A justice is not like a law professor, who might say, 'This is my theory... and this is what I'm going to be faithful to and consistent with,' and in twenty years will look back and say, 'I had a consistent theory of the First Amendment as applied to a particular area.'

The more we learn about life, the less plausible is any evolutionary theory that relies on blind, undirected, piece-by-piece change.

Theories, for me, are just about freeing your mind. It doesn't mean the theory is going to work like a scientific theory works. It's about freeing your mind and making you think a different way.

I didn't know so well chess theory, the theory of chess openings. And so, of course I knew the theory, but not on the level of the best players, so this was my... this was always my weakness.

One of the strangest features of string theory is that it requires more than the three spatial dimensions that we see directly in the world around us. That sounds like science fiction, but it is an indisputable outcome of the mathematics of string theory.

Frankly, these days, without a theory to go with it, I can't see a painting.

There's that old theory that humankind and this planet were seen as the centre of the universe. That was thrown away - how could we be so presumptuous? Well, I subscribe to that.

When you look at the calculation, it's amazing that every time you try to prove or disprove time travel, you've pushed Einstein's theory to the very limits where quantum effects must dominate. That's telling us that you really need a theory of everything to resolve this question. And the only candidate is string theory.

There was one theory put forth by a journalist recently. I have a lot of friends that have died prematurely and a lot of friends that have died of natural causes. I've lost a lot of people over the years. This journalist basically recommended to me that God keeps me around because I amuse him.

A friend of mine had this great theory about the Teletubbies, that it's preparing us for being mindless. And getting us ready for living in an underground world. That's why the scenery is so flat.

There is a new venue for theory, necessarily impure, where it emerges in and as the very event of cultural translation. This is not the displacement of theory by historicism, nor a simple historicization of theory that exposes the contingent limits of its more generalizable claims.

I studied chord theory and started playing the piano.

I would say that, intellectually, Catholicism had no more impact on me than did social theory.

The 'science' for which the United States is respected has nothing to do with the unscientific and baseless theory of evolution.

The original and brilliant idea of an MBA was the opportunity for students to study the theory and application of business and management principles.

If you ask most atheists if the theory of evolution has anything to do with a belief, however, they will tell you that it doesn't. It's not something that has to be believed. It is a 'fact.'

Good economic theory must give the people the chance to use their talents to build their own lives. We must get away from the traditional route where the rich will do the business and the poor will depend on private or public charity.

Without a revolutionary theory there cannot be a revolutionary movement.

I am, by nature, a guitar player... I learned all of these other instruments around that, and around the theory that I built learning the guitar.

I think literary theory has not been terribly good for English studies in a while. It's not that theory isn't interesting, but it isn't about books, or the idiosyncrasies and complexities of putting language together.

Even for practical purposes theory generally turns out the most important thing in the end.

Of course, there is no reconciliation between the theory of evolution by natural selection and the traditional religious view of the origin of the human mind.

If the theory turns out to be right, that will be tremendously thick and tasty icing on the cake.

The profit orientation is only one orientation of a person. The same people who are interested in profit-making are also selfless. I am not saying that capitalist theory is wrong. I am saying that it has not been interpreted and practiced fully.

A theory is no more like a fact than a photograph is like a person.

I'd say many features of string theory don't mesh with what we observe in everyday life.

Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.

A unified theory would put us at the doorstep of a vast universe of things that we could finally explore with precision.

We need a theory that goes before the Big Bang, and that's String Theory. String Theory says that perhaps two universes collided to create our universe, or maybe our universe is butted from another universe leaving an umbilical cord. Well, that umbilical cord is called a wormhole.

I've developed a theory that there's an inverse relationship between money and imagination. That if you've got lots of imagination then you don't really need much money, and if you've got lots of money then you won't bother with much imagination.

I always had the theory that the most important thing is be happy, enjoy what are you doing, and be fresh mentally.

I was brought up to understand Darwin's theory of evolution. I spent hours and hours in the Natural History Museum in London looking at the descriptions of how different kinds of animals had evolved, looking at the sequence of fossil bones looking gradually more and more and more and more like the modern fossil.

Darwin's theory of evolution is a framework by which we understand the diversity of life on Earth. But there is no equation sitting there in Darwin's 'Origin of Species' that you apply and say, 'What is this species going to look like in 100 years or 1,000 years?' Biology isn't there yet with that kind of predictive precision.

Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?

I had no idea what I was doing when I wrote 'Search.' There was no carefully designed work plan. There was no theory that I was out to prove.

We've heard some theories, but there is a lot of mystery surrounding my adoption.

As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.

A theory not only explains the world we see, it lets us imagine other worlds, and, even more significantly, lets us act to create those worlds. Developing everyday theories, like scientific theories, has allowed human beings to change the world.

My theory is that sometimes writers write books because they want to read them, and they aren't there to be read. And I think that was true of me.

First of all, the Big Bang wasn't very big. Second of all, there was no bang. Third, Big Bang Theory doesn't tell you what banged, when it banged, how it banged. It just said it did bang. So the Big Bang theory in some sense is a total misnomer.

Supersymmetry is a theory which stipulates that for every known particle there should be a partner particle. For instance, the electron should be paired with a supersymmetric 'selectron,' quarks ought to have 'squark' partners, and so on.

If you take Darwin's theory and extend it to its logical end, it can be used to justify a number of very horrendous things.

The primary theory embraced by the Bush administration to justify its War on Terror policies was that the 'battlefield' is no longer confined to identifiable geographical areas, but instead, the entire globe is now one big, unlimited 'battlefield.'

I have no idea who coined the term 'the New Journalism,' or when it was coined. I have never even liked the term. Any movement, group, party, program, philosophy or theory that goes under a name with 'new' in it is just begging for trouble, of course.

I really don't like art where you need to know so much theory to understand. If the theory is removed, it doesn't do anything. That means that this work is an illustration of theory, and I don't believe in the power of the work itself.

Falsifiability for a theory is great, but a theory can still be respectable even if it is not falsifiable, as long as it is verifiable.

Because the theory of quantum mechanics could explain all of chemistry and the various properties of substances, it was a tremendous success. But still there was the problem of the interaction of light and matter.

Studying music in a conservatory would be stifling for me, although I respect people who can do it. And by no means am I an expert at notating music or music theory - that's not really my world.

String theory is not the only theory that can accommodate extra dimensions, but it certainly is the one that really demands and requires it.

Now you mustn't think that I don't have any ideas for novels in my head. I've got ideas for ten novels in my head. But with every idea I have, I already foresee the wrong novels I would write, because I also have critical ideas in my head; I've got a full theory of the perfect novel, and that's what stumps me.

Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.

In 2010, my two Harvard mathematician colleagues and I dismantled kin-selection theory, which was the reigning theory of the origin of altruism at the time.

I can assure you that no string theorist would be interested in working on string theory if it were somehow permanently beyond testability. That would no longer be doing science.

I get paid to do what I love. If you understand physics, the foundation of the atomic theory and relativity, you understand how the future is going to unfold. You understand what things are not possible. You understand why things work. I get paid to do what I love the most, and that is to work on the Unified Field Theory and to see the future.

The masses will reject any theory, however reasonable it may be, if it lays a restriction upon the appetite.

The full name of string theory is really superstring theory. The 'super' stands for this feature called supersymmetry, which, without getting into any details, predicts that for every known particle in the world, there should be a partner particle, the so-called supersymmetric partner.

The funny thing is, I sometimes get the impression that some people outside of the field think that there's some element of security that we have in working on a theory that hasn't made any predictions that can be proven false. In a sense, we're working on something unfalsifiable.

Some people would claim that things like love, joy and beauty belong to a different category from science and can't be described in scientific terms, but I think they can now be explained by the theory of evolution.

My personal theory is that younger audiences disdain books - not because those readers are dumber than past readers, but because today's reader is smarter.

Religion is not theory - it is life. It is not intellectual conviction - it is divine humanity, and nothing else.

According to 'M' theory, ours is not the only universe. Instead, 'M' theory predicts that a great many universes were created out of nothing.

All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it.

The cyclic universe theory predicts no gravitational waves from the early universe.

It was Einstein's dream to discover the grand design of the universe, a single theory that explains everything. However, physicists in Einstein's day hadn't made enough progress in understanding the forces of nature for that to be a realistic goal.

The market always, in theory at least, looks ahead. And it's always trying to take in every bit of information that it can as quickly as it can. You don't really care so much if the company made a dollar last year; you want to know what it's going to make this year.

I can't negate the theory that the Huxtables on 'The Cosby Show' may have helped pave the way for the Obama family. People enjoyed watching that black family.

A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas.

On the other hand, we don't understand the theory too completely, and because of this fuzziness of spacetime, the very concept of spacetime and spacetime dimensions isn't precisely defined.

Only those who are behind in technology want that. But a lot of things that sound good in theory unfortunately don't work in the real world. Just look at Communism. Everyone's equal but no one works to get ahead.

I would have liked to be on the streets of Manhattan during 9/11. My working theory is that people are much kinder to each other in times of trauma than we tend to portray in our stories.

Like almost all others began with metaphysical discussions. The theory has advanced but the practical science is still in its infancy and the modern statesman is constantly short of facts on which he can base his speculations.

Obviously when something like that happens, there is major disappointment and status quo is not going to do it. There are some good players there and some people that were working the players. Why they didn't come together? I don't know because I'm not there. Everybody has got a theory on it and we'll let everybody work on their theory and we're going to focus on the Manitoba Moose, playing this last game well and getting ready for the playoffs.

One theory is it may be coming from these large cargo ships just off the shore.

One will not deny me, I trust, all the theory of oxidation and combustion, the analysis and decomposition of air by metals and combustible bodies, the theory of acidification, more precise knowledge on the nature of a great numbers of acids, notably

One meteorologist remarked that if the theory were correct, one flap of a seagull's wings would be enough to alter the course of the weather forever

My editor and I had a theory that if the movie engages their attention, they won't mind sitting there for three hours - which I find true myself.

My dad didn't want to hear that you was going into the studio-you came back late at night and he didn't understand that, that theory didn't exist in his mind.

Phantom Menace, ... disprove the theory that a Memorial Day release is the save-all of the industry.

Obviously, these stocks have had a huge run-up. The theory is to sell on the news. That's what's occurring is you're selling on the news.

Obviously it negates the theory about Dow 1,000. What (the new milestone) tells us is people have a lot of confidence. Money is still flowing into the United States despite some question marks about inflation. Nothing has changed.

Obviously, this is theory and easier said than done. Tracking every nickel is a big process and a lot of people don't do it. You can make the best budget, but if you don't track it, what good does it do? In my house, every month, we compare the actual to the budget. It's not fun. My wife hates me for it. But you have to track what you're spending.

My first contact with game theory was a popular article in 'Fortune Magazine' which I read in my last high school year. I was immediately attracted to the subject matter, and when I studied mathematics, I found the fundamental book by von Neumann and Morgenstern in the library and studied it.

I did several types of work about several investigations of application of game theory to international relations.

If we learned about people's habits, attitudes and behaviors in completely different categories, we felt that, in theory, we could start to predict how people would behave in our own categories.

If we do this movie, I think it will be time to retire. My theory is: Do something good in the end and that will close out your longevity. After that, you can go on home and sit down.

Learning both sides of the plate - what is a strike and what is not a strike. And my biggest theory is being able to hit with two strikes, being able to put the bat on the ball.

Lowering the bar creates a novel theory of impeachment, ... It would permanently weaken the presidency.

Let's say you get a patent on something like a pop-up window. Of course, you could, in theory, go after everyone on the Internet, but you don't. What you end up doing is picking off the weak members of the herd, companies that don't have the money to defend themselves or independent Web sites, or occasionally big companies that you think will not have very much backbone and will quickly settle.

MOLECULE, n. The ultimate, indivisible unit of matter. It is distinguished from the corpuscle, also the ultimate, indivisible unit of matter, by a closer resemblance to the atom, also the ultimate, indivisible unit of matter. Three great scientific theories of the structure of the universe are the molecular, the corpuscular and the atomic. A fourth affirms, with Haeckel, the condensation of precipitation of matter from ether --whose existence is proved by the condensation of precipitation. The present trend of scientific thought is toward the theory of ions. The ion differs from the molecule, the corpuscle and the atom in that it is an ion. A fifth theory is held by idiots, but it is doubtful if they know any more about the matter than the others.

Miranda is in theory a very simple concept that has actually become pretty complicated, ... The fallback should be, you should have a form that's been legally adopted through the prosecuting authority.

Since this is a new program, we would begin with the larger accounts first. The basic theory is to provide protection for these accounts, which unfortunately can tend to disappear.