Top 100 Quotes About Hypotheses
#1. Religious fermentation is always a symptom of the intellectual vigor of a society; and it is only when they forget that they are hypotheses and put on rationalistic and authoritative pretensions, that our faiths do harm.
William James
#2. The role of science is to be systematic, to be accurate, to be orderly, but it certainly is not to imply that the aggregated, successful hypotheses of the past have the kind of truth that goes into a number system.
Edwin Land
#3. Is evolution a theory, a system, or an hypothesis? It is much more: it is a general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must bow and which they must satisfy henceforward if they are to be thinkable and true.
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
#4. To consider hypotheses is surely always better than to dogmatize ins blaue hinein
William James
#5. Hypotheses are the scaffolds which are erected in front of a building and removedd when the building is completed. They are indispensable to the worker; but the worker must not mistake the scaffolding for the building.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#6. All science is based on models, and every scientific model comprises three distinct stages: statement of well-defined hypotheses; deduction of all the consequences of these hypotheses, and nothing but these consequences; confrontation of these consequences with observed data.
Maurice Allais
#7. You can scoff at opinions. You can reject hypotheses. You can discard theories out of hand. But you cannot reject the facts
Forrest Carr
#8. What doubts, what hypotheses, what labyrinths of amusement, what fields of disputation, what an ocean of false learning, may be avoided by that single notion of immaterialism!
George Berkeley
#9. But don't despise error. When touched by genius, when led by chance, the most superior truth can come into being from even the most foolish error. The important inventions which have been brought about in every realm of science from false hypotheses number in the hundreds, indeed in the thousands.
Stefan Zweig
#10. HYPOTHESES: Evil is boring. Cynicism is idiotic. Fear is a bad habit. Despair is lazy. Joy is fascinating. Love is an act of heroic genius. Pleasure is our birthright. Receptivity is a superpower.
Rob Brezsny
#11. Listen to hypotheses as they plead their cases before you, but remember that you are not a hypothesis, you are the judge. Therefore do not seek to argue for one side or another, for if you knew your destination, you would already be there.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#12. Research is so unpredictable. There are periods when nothing works and all your experiments are a disaster and all your hypotheses are wrong.
Francis Collins
#13. Taking this view, it is possible to see financial markets as a laboratory for testing hypotheses, albeit not strictly scientific ones. The truth is, successful investing is a kind of alchemy.
George Soros
#14. Science cannot promise eternal truths; only the elimination of false hypotheses and the establishment of what is currently the most likely explanation of an aspect of reality
David Filkin
#15. There are apparently two hypotheses about jealousy: that it is a product of civilization and that it is a basic instinct of animals.
Kobo Abe
#16. Whenever two hypotheses cover the facts, use the simpler of the two.
William Of Ockham
#17. one ponders. And when one ponders, one creates theories - hypotheses, to explain the world.
Sherman Alexie
#18. Wrong hypotheses, rightly worked from, have produced more useful results than unguided observations.
Augustus De Morgan
#19. Open a book and a voice speaks. A world, more or less alien or welcoming, emerges to enrich a reader's store of hypotheses about how life is to be understood.
Marilynne Robinson
#20. A dozen more questions occurred to me. Not to mention twenty-two possible solutions to each one, sixteen resulting hypotheses and counter-theorems, eight abstract speculations, a quadrilateral equation, two axioms, and a limerick. That's raw intelligence for you.
Jonathan Stroud
#21. (1) statement of the problem, (2) hypotheses as to the cause of the problem, (3) experiments designed to test each hypothesis, (4) predicted results of the experiments, (5) observed results of the experiments and (6) conclusions from the results of the experiments.
Robert M. Pirsig
#22. Science, we are repeatedly told, is the most reliable form of knowledge about the world because it is based on testable hypotheses. Religion, by contrast, is based on faith. The term 'doubting Thomas' well illustrates the difference.
Paul Davies
#23. We have to be aware that the scientific community throws up tons of different hypotheses and at a certain point we'll find out who was right and who was wrong. But we have to go with the best information right now, which I would claim to be the IPCC reports.
Bjorn Lomborg
#24. My anguish came from my hypothesis that other people's hypothetical hypotheses about me mattered. Ridiculous!
Martha Beck
#25. Hypotheses are nets: only he who casts will catch.
Novalis
#26. In experimental philosophy, propositions gathered from phenomena by induction should be considered either exactly or very nearly true notwithstanding any contrary hypotheses, until yet other phenomena make such propositions either more exact or liable to exceptions.
Isaac Newton
#27. Modern science should indeed arouse in all of us a humility before the immensity of the unexplored and a tolerance for crazy hypotheses.
Martin Gardner
#28. Great difficulties are felt at first and these cannot be overcome except by starting from experiments .. and then be conceiving certain hypotheses ... But even so, very much hard work remains to be done and one needs not only great perspicacity but often a degree of good fortune.
Christiaan Huygens
#29. To rewrite history on the bases of hypotheses which have not materialized is not only a fruitless task, but, in my eyes, meaningless.
Jean Monnet
#30. The hypotheses we accept ought to explain phenomena which we have observed. But they ought to do more than this: our hypotheses ought to foretell phenomena which have not yet been observed.
William Whewell
#31. Knowledge advances as much through negative results and thwarted hypotheses as it does by theories that prove to be correct.
Sue Armstrong
#32. All descriptions of reality are temporary hypotheses.
Gautama Buddha
#33. You will be right, over the course of many transactions, if your hypotheses are correct, your facts are correct, and your reasoning is correct. True conservatism is only possible through knowledge and reason.
Warren Buffett
#34. There are many hypotheses in science that are wrong. That's perfectly alright; it's the aperture to finding out what's right. Science is a self-correcting process. To be accepted, new ideas must survive the most rigorous standards of evidence and scrutiny.
Carl Sagan
#35. Better our hypotheses die for our errors than ourselves.
Karl Popper
#36. In science, each new result, sometimes quite surprising, heralds a step forward and allows one to discard some hypotheses, even though one or two of these might have been highly favored.
Stanley B. Prusiner
#37. Economics limps along with one foot in untested hypotheses and the other in untestable slogans.
Joan Robinson
#38. One-dimensional thought is systematically promoted by the makers of politics and their purveyors of mass information. Their universe of discourse is populated by self-validating hypotheses which, incessantly and monopolistically repeated, become hyponotic definitions of dictations.
Herbert Marcuse
#39. If anyone offers conjectures about the truth of things from the mere possibility of hypotheses, I do not see by what stipulation anything certain can be determined in any science, since one or another set of hypotheses may always be devised which will appear to supply new difficulties.
Isaac Newton
#40. One of the most beautiful hypotheses ever propounded in physics is ... the Dynamical Theory of Gases
Simon Newcomb
#41. Hypotheses like professors, when they are seen not to work any longer in the laboratory, should disappear.
Henry Edward Armstrong
#42. The novel is a territory where one does not make assertions; it is a territory of play and of hypotheses.
Milan Kundera
#43. So far as hypotheses are concerned, let no one expect anything certain from astronomy, which cannot furnish it, lest he accept as the truth ideas conceived for another purpose, and depart from this study a greater fool than when he entered it.
Nicolaus Copernicus
#44. When I was a teenager, science meshed with my developing ideals - such as the challenge to authority that was central to punk rock. In science, anyone from any walk of life could make a discovery that would overturn prevailing hypotheses. And that was a cause for celebration among scientists.
Greg Graffin
#45. I think if you place Jesus firmly in the historical context ... you can make very educated hypotheses and guesses about how he lived.
Reza Aslan
#46. Truly conservative actions arise from intelligent hypotheses, correct facts and sound reasoning.
Warren Buffett
#47. It reveals to me the causes of many natural phenomena that are entirely incomprehensible in the light of the generally accepted hypotheses. To refute the latter I collected many proofs, but I do not publish them ... I would dare to publish my speculations if there were people men like you.
Galileo Galilei
#48. Think of a hypothesis as a card. A theory is a house made of hypotheses.
Marilyn Vos Savant
#49. Unfortunately, in the field of evolution most explanations are not good. As a matter of fact, they hardly qualify as explanations at all; they are suggestions, hunches, pipe dreams, hardly worthy of being called hypotheses.
Norman Macbeth
#50. The grand aim of all science is to cover the greatest number of empirical facts by logical deduction from the smallest number of hypotheses or axioms.
Albert Einstein
#51. I had a hunch. Officially, scientists don't work on hunches. We work on hypotheses and observations and plenty of evidence. Hunches don't get you research funding, tenure at your university, or access to the world's largest telescopes. But a hunch was all I had.
Mike Brown
#52. The physicist can never subject an isolated hypothesis to experimental test, but only a whole group of hypotheses.
Pierre Duhem
#53. Experimental work provides the strongest evidence for scientific realism. This is not because we test hypotheses about entities. It is because entities that in principle cannot be 'observed' are manipulated to produce a new phenomena
[sic] and to investigate other aspects of nature.
Ian Hacking
#55. Experimental investigation, to borrow a phrase employed by Kepler respecting the testing of hypotheses, is "a very great thief of time." Sometimes it costs many days to determine a fact that can be stated in a line.
John William Draper
#56. The most superior of scientific goals is to embrace a maximum of experiment with a minimum of hypotheses.
Albert Einstein
#57. Truly I say to you, a single number has more genuine and permanent value than an expensive library full of hypotheses.
Robert Mayer
#58. We favor hypotheses for their simplicity and explanatory power, much as the architect of the world might have done in choosing which possibility to create.
Ian Hacking
#59. Beware of the problem of testing too many hypotheses; the more you torture the data, the more likely they are to confess, but confessions obtained under duress may not be admissible in the court of scientific opinion.
Stephen Stigler
#60. Reality may avoid the obligation to be interesting, but ... hypotheses may not.
Jorge Luis Borges
#61. True science is never speculative; it employs hypotheses as suggesting points for inquiry, but it never adopts the hypotheses as though they were demonstrated propositions.
Cleveland Abbe
#62. To be fertile in hypotheses is the first perquisite of creativity and to be willing to throw them away the moment experience contradicts them is the next.
William James
#63. Hypotheses should be subservient only in explaining the properties of things but not assumed in determining them, unless so far as they may furnish experiments.
Isaac Newton
#64. Your goal, after enough of these customer conversations, is to be able to stand up in front of your company and say, Here were our hypotheses about our customers, their problems, and how they worked. Now here's what they're saying their issues really are, and this is how they really spend their day.
Steven Gary Blank
#65. Never let yourself be goaded into taking seriously problems about words and their meanings. What must be taken seriously are questions of fact, and assertions about facts: theories and hypotheses; the problems they solve; and the problems they raise.
Karl R. Popper
#66. We avoid the gravest difficulties when, giving up the attempt to frame hypotheses concerning the constitution of matter, we pursue statistical inquiries as a branch of rational mechanics.
J. Willard Gibbs
#68. Beginning in 1986, a series of field experiments were designed to test the various hypotheses which had been put forth to explain the Antarctic ozone hole.
Mario J. Molina
#69. We are unable to discount the hypotheses that the world began three years ago.
Nagaru Tanigawa
#70. The work of artists and scietists is ultimately the pursuit of truth, but members of both camps understand that truth is its very nature is contextual and changeable, dependent on point of view, and that today's truths becomes tomorrow's disproven hypotheses of forgotten objet d'arts.
Daniel J. Levitin
#71. The slow, the never ending approach to truth consists in perpetually forming and testing hypotheses, accepting those at which at the time seem to fit the facts and rejecting the others.
James G. Frazer
#72. When the scientific method came into being, it gave us a new window on the truth; namely, a method by laboratory-controlled experiments to winnow true hypotheses from false ones.
Huston Smith
#73. Part of the scientific temperament is this tolerance for holding multiple hypotheses in mind at the same time.
David Eagleman
#74. Those who assume hypotheses as first principles of their speculations ... may indeed form an ingenious romance, but a romance it will still be.
Roger Cotes
#75. How can we assert and test hypotheses if there are no such things as assertions that can be evaluated as true or false? How can we design experiments if there is not such thing as design? How can we explain anything if we do not assert anything and if others cannot understand it?
Angus J.L. Menuge
#76. The point is to test different hypotheses to determine which craving is driving your routine. Are
Anonymous
#77. Our hypotheses are initially rooted in theoretical consistency and elegance, but ... ultimatel y it is experiment not rigid belief that determines what is correct.
Lisa Randall
#78. The number of hypotheses and theories about climate change are numerous. Quite naturally they have caught the public attention, as any proof of past climactic change points to the possibility of future climate change, which inevitably will have significant implications for global economics.
Eduard Bruckner
#79. The best and safest method of philosophizing seems to be first to inquire diligently into the properties of things, and establishing those properties by experiments, and then to proceed more slowly to hypotheses for the explanation of them.
Isaac Newton
#80. The limitations of archaeology are galling. It collects phenomena, but hardly ever can isolate them so as to interpret scientifically; it can frame any number of hypotheses, but rarely, if ever, scientifically prove.
David George Hogarth
#81. Science is the business of generating testable hypotheses.
Michael Crichton
#82. Theory is the best guide for experiment - that were it not for theory and the problems and hypotheses that come out of it, we would not know the points we wanted to verify, and hence would experiment aimlessly
Henry Hazlitt
#83. The data that can bear on the confirmation of perceptual hypotheses includes, in the general case, considerably less than the organism may know.
Jerry Fodor
#84. My Design in this Book is not to explain the Properties of Light by Hypotheses, but to propose and prove them by Reason and Experiments: In order to which, I shall premise the following Definitions and Axioms.
Isaac Newton
#85. It is the simple hypotheses of which one must be most wary; because these are the ones that have the most chances of passing unnoticed.
Henri Poincare
#86. Hypotheses are only the pieces of scaffolding which are erected round a building during the course of construction, and which are taken away as soon as the edifice is completed.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#87. Whether statistics be an art or a science ... or a scientific art, we concern ourselves little. It is the basis of social and political dynamics, and affords the only secure ground on which the truth or falsehood of the theories and hypotheses of that complicated science can be brought to the test.
Adolphe Quetelet
#88. The number of hypotheses available to explain any given phenomenon is infinite.
Robert M. Pirsig
#89. I would finally renounce my delusional hypotheses and revert to thinking of myself as a human of more conventional circumstances and return to mathematical research.
John Forbes Nash Jr.
#90. Creativity is the process of sensing problems or gaps in information, then identifying the difficulties and seeking solutions through trial and error or through forming hypotheses.
Ellis Paul Torrance
#91. Philosophy, like science, is only a collection of hypotheses, introduced for the usefulness of the ensemble, or for economy of thought.
Fulton J. Sheen
#92. I think philosophers can do things akin to theoretical scientists, in that, having read about empirical data, they too can think of what hypotheses and theories might account for that data. So there's a continuity between philosophy and science in that way.
Robert Nozick
#93. Many 'hard' scientists regard the term 'social science' as an oxymoron. Science means hypotheses you can test, and prove or disprove. Social science is little more than observation putting on airs.
Michael Kinsley
#94. We may assume the superiority ceteris paribus of the demonstration which derives from fewer postulates or hypotheses - in short, from fewer premises.
Aristotle.
#96. Taken as hypotheses, religious claims do very badly. Yet the striking fact is that this does not worry Christians.
Tim Crane
#97. The sound of progress is perhaps the sound of plummeting hypotheses.
Peter Haggett
#98. Scientists have an expression for hypotheses that are utterly useless even for learning from mistakes. They refer to them as being "not even wrong." Most so-called spiritual discourse is of this type.
Christopher Hitchens
#99. I am myself an empiric in natural philosophy, suffering my faith to go no further than my facts. I am pleased, however, to see the efforts of hypothetical speculation, because by the collisions of different hypotheses, truth may be elicited and science advanced in the end.
Thomas Jefferson
#100. Agendas are what get people, even historians, out of bed in the mornings, though one might hope that, once at the desk, they allow the data to challenge the hypotheses they have dreamed up overnight.
N. T. Wright
