Quotes About Hypothesis

#1. When all is said and done, science actually takes hard work and a willingness to sometimes find out that your most cherished hypothesis is wrong.

Alice Dreger

#2. It appears, then, to be a condition of a genuinely scientific hypothesis, that it be not destined always to remain an hypothesis, but be certain to be either proved or disproved by..comparison with observed facts.

John Stuart Mill

#3. History, human or geological, represents our hypothesis, couched in terms of past events, devised to explain our present-day observations.

M. King Hubbert

#4. An aphorism is an extreme synthesis of thesis and antithesis, theory and practice, it's a mixture of intuition and observation, hypothesis and illusions of certainty and probability, history and stupidity.

William C. Brown

#5. As has repeatedly been stated, the underlying hypothesis, which in a number of cases has been supported by direct experimental evidence, is that each gene controls the production, function, and specificity of a particular enzyme.

Edward Lawrie Tatum

#6. A good hypothesis in science must have other properties than those of the phenomenon it is immediately invoked to explain, otherwise it is not prolific enough.

William James

#7. When we advance more confident claims and they fail to come to fruition, this constitutes much more powerful evidence against our hypothesis. We can't really blame anyone for losing faith when this occurs

Nate Silver

#8. My hypothesis is that conservative Republicans have very clear values, and when you have that, you're simply more relaxed.

Helen Fisher

#9. 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

#10. You'll notice something interesting about the way scientists think: they don't start with data. They start with a hypothesis. Then they go to the data.

John Braddock

#11. To consider hypotheses is surely always better than to dogmatize ins blaue hinein

William James

#12. Earlier theories ... were based on the hypothesis that all the matter in the universe was created in one big bang at a particular time in the remote past. [Coining the "big bang" expression.]

Fred Hoyle

#13. I am not here concerned with intent, but with scientific standards, especially the ability to tell the difference between a fact, an opinion, a hypothesis, and a hole in the ground.

Serge Lang

#14. There may be babblers, wholly ignorant of mathematics, who dare to condemn my hypothesis, upon the authority of some part of the Bible twisted to suit their purpose. I value them not, and scorn their unfounded judgment.

Nicolaus Copernicus

#15. The central hypothesis of the theory is that language acquisition occurs in only one way: by understanding messages.

Stephen D. Krashen

#16. Whether religion be true or false, it must be necessarily granted to be the only wise principle and safe hypothesis for a man to live and die by.

John Tillotson

#17. We spent a few hours struggling to come up with better explanations, but each suggestion was shot down almost as soon as it was made. The suggestions became wilder, eventually to the point of silliness.

Donald G. Firesmith

#18. That's how the scientists discover new science. They start out with a hypothesis
an idea
and then others believe enough in the idea that they make it true. You see?

Esther Hicks

#19. The philosopher Didactylos has summed up an alternative hypothesis as "Things just happen. What the hell".

Terry Pratchett

#20. Even facts become fictions without adequate ways of seeing "the facts". We do not need theories so much as the experience that is the source of the theory. We are not satisfied with faith, in the sense of an implausible hypothesis irrationally held: we demand to experience the "evidence".

R.D. Laing

#21. One must credit an hypothesis with all that has had to be discovered in order to demolish it.

Jean Rostand

#22. Hypothesis, my dear young friend, establishes itself by a cumulative process: or, to use popular language, if you make the same guess often enough it ceases to be a guess and becomes a Scientific Fact. After

C.S. Lewis

#23. God is an hypothesis, and, as such, stands in need of proof: the onus probandi rests on the theist.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

#24. The scientific discovery appears first as the hypothesis of an analogy; and science tends to become independent of the hypothesis.

William Kingdon Clifford

#25. When a hypothesis enters a scientist's mind, he checks it by calculation and experiment, that is, by the mimicry and the pantomime of truth. It's plausibility infects others, and the hypothesis is accepted as the true explanation for the given phenomenon, until someone finds its faults.

Vladimir Nabokov

#26. But what a weak barrier is truth when it stands in the way of an hypothesis!

Mary Wollstonecraft

#27. Global warming has long since passed from scientific hypothesis to the realm of pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo.

David Deming

#28. 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.

Leonhard Euler

#29. I have steadily endeavored to keep my mind free so as to give up any hypothesis, however much beloved (and I cannot resist forming one on every subject), as soon as the facts are shown to be opposed to it.

Charles Darwin

#30. Any schoolboy can do experiments in the physics laboratory to test various scientific hypothesis. But man, because he has only one life to live, cannot conduct experiments to test whether to follow his passion or not.

Milan Kundera

#31. It isn't that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history's meaning.

Philip Roth

#32. Your life was a hypothesis. Those who die old are made of the past. Thinking of them, one thinks of what they have done. Thinking of you, one thinks of what you could have become. You were, and you will remain, made up of possibilities.

Edouard Leve

#33. There is no other proposition in economics that has more solid empirical evidence supporting it than the Efficient Market Hypothesis ... In the literature of finance, accounting, and the economics of uncertainty, the EMH is accepted as a fact of life.

Michael Jensen

#34. When I was in high school I experimented sexually. The experiment was to never have sex with anybody no matter how hard I tried. Success! Hypothesis confirmed.

Demetri Martin

#35. Humanism ... is not a single hypothesis or theorem, and it dwells on no new facts. It is rather a slow shifting in the philosophic perspective, making things appear as from a new centre of interest or point of sight.

William James

#36. A fact is a simple statement that everyone believes. It is innocent unless found guilty. A hypothesis is a novel suggestion that no one wants to believe. It is guilty until found effective.

Edward Teller

#37. I will listen to any hypothesis but on one condition-that you show me a method by which it can be tested.

August Wilhelm Von Hofmann

#38. Originally, in the early eighties, the drug hypothesis was among the first which occurred to scientists.

Serge Lang

#39. The hypothesis may be put forward, to be tested by the s subsequent investigation, that this development has been in large part a matter of the reciprocal interaction of new factual insights and knowledge on the one hand with changes in the theoretical system on the other.

Talcott Parsons

#40. I know of no significant advance in science that did not require major inputs from both cerebral hemispheres. This is not true for art, where apparently there are no experiments by which capable, dedicated and unbiased observers can determine to their mutual satisfaction which works are great.

Carl Sagan

#41. I started my scientific work by putting forward a hypothesis on the arrangement of atoms in nitrogen-containing molecules.

Alfred Werner

#42. Value investing is predicated on the efficient market hypothesis being wrong.

Seth Klarman

#43. But then the general trouble with ignorance is always that the ignorant person has no idea that that's what they are. You can be ignorant and stupid and go through your whole life without ever encountering any evidence against the hypothesis that you're a genius.

Louis De Bernieres

#44. Nevertheless, as is a frequent occurrence in science, a general hypothesis was constructed from a few specific instances of a phenomenon.

Sidney Altman

#45. What is merely a hypothesis to anyone else is an overwhelming temptation to a wizard.

Barbara Hambly

#46. Man has learned to cope with all questions of importance without recourse to God as a working hypothesis.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#47. Faith is synonymous with working hypothesis.

William James

#48. 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

#49. The whole edifice of modern physics is built up on the fundamental hypothesis of the atomic or molecular constitution of matter.

C. V. Raman

#50. Hypothesis: Brothers and sisters forge family bonds through a complex byplay of accusations and insults.

Gordon Korman

#51. The weapons-violence hypothesis is far too simplistic a basis on which to base sound public policy.

Daniel D. Polsby

#52. Sociologists keep the rationality hypothesis of the consumer away and replace it in the heart of social relations and strengths in which it is taken.

David Abikzir

#53. Don't criticise a hypothesis, come up with a better one.

Edward De Bono

#54. I am not well qualified to criticize the theory of rational expectations and the efficient market hypothesis because as a market participant I considered them so unrealistic that I never bothered to study them.

George Soros

#55. An honorable man will not be bullied by a hypothesis.

Bergen Evans

#56. It wasn't that he seemed at all violent - rather, he had a peculiar unhinged intensity that told her that to challenge him would mean hearing him defend his hypothesis for the next forty minutes.

Joe Pitkin

#57. It wouild be very discouraging if somewhere down the line you could ask a computer if the Riemann hypothesis is correct and it said, 'Yes, it is true, but you won't be able to understand the proof.' John Horgan.

Ronald Graham

#58. His hypothesis was that extroverted leaders enhance group performance when employees are passive, but that introverted leaders are more effective with proactive employees.

Susan Cain

#59. The religious hypothesis, therefore, must be considered only as a particular method of accounting for the visible phenomena of the universe: but no just reasoner will ever presume to infer from it any single fact, and alter or add to the phenomena, in any single particular.

David Hume

#60. Do not say hypothesis, and even less theory: say way of thinking.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

#61. For most cosmologists, a supernatural God is an unnecessary hypothesis. For most Americans, He is an unassailable fact. The American belief machine apparently has a fail-safe component. Nothing shuts it down.

Gary Sloan

#62. An electron is no more (and no less) hypothetical than a star. Nowadays we count electrons one by one in a Geiger counter, as we count the stars one by one on a photographic plate.

Arthur Eddington

#63. The rules of scientific investigation always require us, when we enter the domains of conjecture, to adopt that hypothesis by which the greatest number of known facts and phenomena may be reconciled.

Matthew Fontaine Maury

#64. The first and most important reason for its elimination is the unquestioned fact that evolution is not a science; it is a hypothesis only, a speculation.

William Bell Riley

#65. Being patient will continue to remain something ridiculous as long as tomorrows continue to be something no more than a hypothesis!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#66. The second cause of failure to enact good stems from conflict of intention. High intelligence leads to multiplicity of interest and a sharpened capacity to foresee the consequences of any action. Will is lost in a labyrinth of hypothesis.

John Fowles

#67. My writing is an answer to the partisans of the many and it returns their attack with interest, with a view to showing that the hypothesis of the many, if examined sufficiently in detail, leads to even more ridiculous results than the hypothesis of the One

Zeno Of Elea

#68. Not as a demonstrated natural law, but as a working hypothesis.

Henry Norris Russell

#69. Probably the simplest hypothesis ... is that there may be a slow process of annihilation of matter.

Arthur Eddington

#70. When I was younger, I'd get very empirical with myself. "I have a hypothesis about myself. I'll put myself in a situation, see what happens, then I'll draw a conclusion based on the empirical evidence. Hypothesis: I can play basketball." So I'd try. "Conclusion: I cannot play basketball."

Demetri Martin

#71. Wrong hypotheses, rightly worked from, have produced more useful results than unguided observations.

Augustus De Morgan

#72. This, it may be said, is no more than a hypothesis ... only of that force of precedent which in all times has been so strong to keep alive religious forms of which the original meaning is lost.

William Robertson Smith

#73. The efficient market hypothesis (EMH) explains this phenomenon: current market prices reflect the total knowledge and expectations of all investors, and it is highly unlikely that one investor can know more than the market does collectively. For

Larry E. Swedroe

#74. The hypothesis of the supernatural and/or a supreme being is vague, unfounded, and inapplicable in any practical fashion

PZ Myers

#75. It would be very discouraging if somewhere down the line you could ask a computer if the Riemann hypothesis is correct and it said, 'Yes, it is true, but you won't be able to understand the proof.'

Ronald Graham

#76. Science offers us an explanation of how complexity (the difficult) arose out of simplicity (the easy). The hypothesis of God offers no worthwhile explanation for anything, for it simply postulates what we are trying to explain. It postulates the difficult to explain, and leaves it at that.

Richard Dawkins

#77. I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially to the extent to which it has been applied, will be one of the greatest jokes in the history books of the future. Posterity will marvel that so very flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity it has.

Malcolm Muggeridge

#78. What the use of P [the significance level] implies, therefore, is that a hypothesis that may be true may be rejected because it has not predicted observable results that have not occurred.

Harold Jeffreys

#79. Once again, the only sensible approach is tentatively to reject the dragon hypothesis, to be open to future physical data, and to wonder what the cause might be that so many apparently sane and sober people share the same strange delusion.

Jerry A. Coyne

#80. Graphology is another in a long list of quack substitutes for hard work. It is appealing to those who are impatient with such troublesome matters as research, evidence analysis, reasoning, logic, and hypothesis testing.

Robert Todd Carroll

#81. A hypothesis or theory is clear, decisive, and positive, but it is believed by no one but the man who created it. Experimental findings, on the other hand, are messy, inexact things, which are believed by everyone except the man who did that work.

Harlow Shapley

#82. Napoleon: You have written this huge book on the system of the world without once mentioning the author of the universe. Laplace: Sire, I had no need of that hypothesis. Later when told by Napoleon about the incident, Lagrange commented: Ah, but that is a fine hypothesis. It explains so many things.

Pierre-Simon Laplace

#83. If the hypothesis of evolution is true, living matter must have arisen from non-living matter; for by the hypothesis the condition of the globe was at one time such, that living matter could not have existed in it, life being entirely incompatible with the gaseous state.

Thomas Huxley

#84. Making an investment decision is like formulating a scientific hypothesis and submitting it to a practical test. The main difference is that the hypothesis that underlies an investment decision is intended to make money and not to establish a universally valid generalization.

George Soros

#85. I must begin, not with hypothesis, but with specific instances, no matter how minute.

Paul Klee

#86. It is an hypothesis that the sun will rise tomorrow: and this means that we do not know whether it will rise.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

#87. Significant new peer-reviewed research has cast even more doubt on the hypothesis of dangerous human-caused global warming.

Antonino Zichichi

#88. Every hypothesis is a construction, and because of this it is an authentic theory. In so far as they merit that exigent name, ideas are never a mere reception of presumed realities, but they are constructions of possibilities; therefore they are pure bits of imagination, or fine ideas of our own ...

Jose Ortega Y Gasset

#89. (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

#90. France is a nation devoted to the false hypothesis on which it then builds marvelously logical structures.

Gore Vidal

#91. In writing the history of a disease, every philosophical hypothesis whatsoever, that has previously occupied the mind of the author, should lie in abeyance.

Thomas Sydenham

#92. Should you start with a hypothesis and analyze data in a way that supported it, or start with the data and sift through it for a useful hypothesis?

Robert Littell

#93. Faith is the choice of the nobler hypothesis.' Not the noblest, one never knows what that is. But the nobler, the best one can see when the choice is made.

Robert K. Greenleaf

#94. If I were to awaken after having slept for a thousand years, my first question would be: Has the Riemann hypothesis been proven?

David Hilbert

#95. Rousseau. - Although this politician, the paramount authority of the Democrats, makes the social edifice rest upon the general will, no one has so completely admitted the hypothesis of the entire passiveness of human nature in the presence of the lawgiver: - "If

Frederic Bastiat

#96. It matters not to an empiricist from what quarter an hypothesis may come to him: he may have acquired it by fair means or by foul; passion may have whispered or accident suggested it; but if the total drift of thinking continues to confirm it, that is what he means by its being true.

William James

#97. Nonetheless, it still remains true that as a set of cognitive beliefs, religious doctrines constitute a speculative hypothesis of an extremely low order of probability.

Sidney Hook

#98. I find no flaw in your reasoning about the Analytical Engine; I admire it; but you are aware that it rests entirely on the hypothesis that I care for the 'whole human race.

Charles Babbage

#99. The facts which have caused us to believe in the dominance of the pleasure principle in mental life also find expression in the hypothesis that the mental apparatus endeavours to keep the quantity of excitation present in it as low as possible or at least to keep it constant.

Sigmund Freud

#100. My anguish came from my hypothesis that other people's hypothetical hypotheses about me mattered. Ridiculous!

Martha Beck