Top 100 Quotes About Scientific Theory
#1. The proper measure of a philosophical system or a scientific theory is not the degree to which it anticipated modern thought, but its degree of success in treating the philosophical and scientific problems of its own day.
Steven Weinberg
#2. For a scientific theory of him to be possible, man, including his habits of valuation, has to be taken as determined by causal laws, as an instance and part of nature.
Hans Jonas
#3. A theory is only as good as its assumptions. If the premises are false, the theory has no real scientific value. The only scientific criterion for judging the validity of a scientific theory is a confrontation with the data of experience.
Maurice Allais
#4. There is no scientific theory that could lead us from a detailed map of every single neuron in someone's brain to a conscious experience. We don't even have the beginnings of a theory whose conclusion would be such a system is conscious.
Stuart J. Russell
#7. No scientific theory achieves public acceptance until it has been thoroughly discredited.
Douglas Yates
#8. A new scientific theory is seldom stated with such clarity by its original author, and usually takes many years to creep into public conciousness.
John Ziman
#9. I venture to define science as a series of interconnected concepts and conceptual schemes arising from experiment and observation and fruitful of further experiments and observations. The test of a scientific theory is, I suggest, its fruitfulness.
James Bryant Conant
#10. A scientific theory that laughter and humor increase the odds of survival among patients with terminal illnesses?
Suzanne Brockmann
#11. No particular theory may ever be regarded as absolutely certain ... No scientific theory is sacrosanct ...
Karl Popper
#12. It is sometimes said that we should never believe a scientific theory until it is verified by experiment. But a famous astronomer has also stated that we should never believe an observation until it is confirmed by a theory.
Joao Magueijo
#13. The idea of a universal mind or Logos would be, I think, a fairly plausible inference from the present state of scientific theory.
Arthur Eddington
#14. Extreme heroism springs from something that no scientific theory can fully explain; it's an illogical impulse that flies in the face of biology, psychology, actuarial statistics, and basic common sense.
Christopher McDougall
#15. You always have to be worried about something that is considered a so-called 'scientific theory' that fits every scenario. Climate change, as they've defined it, can never be disproved.
Ted Cruz
#16. Neither evolution nor creation qualifies as a scientific theory.
Duane Gish
#17. Every 'good' scientific theory is a prohibition: it forbids certain things to happen. The more a theory forbids, the better it is.
Karl R. Popper
#18. A valid scientific theory is predictive, verifiable, and replicable. To me, that's beautiful.
Dean Ornish
#19. It is difficult even to attach a precise meaning to the term "scientific truth." So different is the meaning of the word "truth" according to whether we are dealing with a fact of experience, a mathematical proposition or a scientific theory. "Religious truth" conveys nothing clear to me at all.
Albert Einstein
#20. A universe with a God would look quite different from a universe without one. A physics, a biology where there is a God is bound to look different. So the most basic claims of religion are scientific. Religion is a scientific theory.
Richard Dawkins
#21. . . .a scientific theory is just a mathematical model we make to describe our observations: it exists only in our minds. So it is meaningless to ask: which is real, "real" or "imaginary" time? It is simply a matter of which is the more useful description.
Stephen Hawking
#22. Class analysis can thus function not simply as part of scientific theory of interests and conflicts, but of an emancipatory theory of alternatives and social justice as well. Even if socialism is off the historical agenda, the idea of countering the exploitative logic of capitalism is not.
Erik Olin Wright
#23. Any attempt to dismiss a phenomenon that is not understood merely by explaining it as hallucination becomes irrelevant when a coherent scientific theory can be applied.
Amit Goswami
#24. We do not master a scientific theory until we have shelled and completely prised free its mathematical kernel.
David Hilbert
#25. Scientific theory is a contrived foothold in the chaos of living phenomena.
Wilhelm Reich
#26. About seven years later I was given a book about the periodic table of the elements. For the first time I saw the elegance of scientific theory and its predictive power.
Sidney Altman
#27. A good scientific theory is one which is falsifiable, which has not been falsified.
Richard Dawkins
#28. Faith in the possibility of science, generated antecedently to the development of modern scientific theory, is an unconscious derivative from medieval theology.
Alfred North Whitehead
#29. Qualities I sought in a scientific theory were naturalness, inner perfection and logical simplicity from an aesthetic approach.
Albert Einstein
#30. There are two theories of evolution. There is the genuine scientific theory; and there is the talk-radio pretend version, designed not to enlighten but to deceive and enrage.
Edward Humes
#31. My provocative statement is that we desperately need a serious, scientific theory of cities and scientific theory means quantifiable, relying on underlying generic principles that can be made in a - put into a predictive framework. That's the quest.
Geoffrey West
#32. One does not ask whether a scientific theory is true, but only whether it is convenient.
Henri Poincare
#33. My choice of colors does not rest on any scientific theory, it is based on observation, on feeling, on the experience of my sensibility.
Henri Matisse
#34. The content of scientific theory itself offers no moral foundation for the personal conduct of life.
Albert Einstein
#35. I have come to the conclusion that Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory, but a metaphysical research programme ...
Karl Popper
#36. Christ is indispensable to any scientific theory, even if its practitioners do not have a clue about him.
William A. Dembski
#38. Our acceptance of an ontology is, I think, similar in principle to our acceptance of a scientific theory, say a system of physics;we adopt, at least insofar as we are reasonable, the simplest conceptual scheme into which the disordered fragments of raw experience can be fitted and arranged.
Willard Van Orman Quine
#39. Scientific theory and its application to the growing needs of mankind advance hand in hand.
Cargill Gilston Knott
#40. The hold of the evolutionary paradigm is so powerful that an idea which is more like a principle of medieval astrology than a serious twentieth century scientific theory has become a reality for evolutionary biologists.
Michael Denton
#41. 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.
Steve Martin
#42. It would seem that the scientific revolution involved not just a progressive transformation of scientific theory, but also a transformation in what were considered to be the observable facts!
Alan F. Chalmers
#43. Europe is so well gardened that it resembles a work of art, a scientific theory, a neat metaphysical system. Man has re-created Europe in his own image.
Aldous Huxley
#44. The scientific theory I like best is that the rings of Saturn are composed entirely of lost airline luggage.
Mark Russell
#45. (Crank theories) always violated the first rule of a scientific model: they were uncheckable.
Gregory Benford
#46. They believed that prediction was just a function of keeping track of things. If you knew enough, you could predict anything. That's been cherished scientific belief since Newton.'
And?'
Chaos theory throws it right out the window.
Michael Crichton
#47. 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.
Alison Gopnik
#48. The theory [of evolution] is a scientific mistake.
Louis Agassiz
#49. It is only, or at any rate it is chiefly, the literary and scientific intelligentsia, the very people who ought to be the guardians of liberty, who are beginning to despise it, in theory as well as in practice.
George Orwell
#50. Memorizing and regurgitating are not science. Real science is a constant investigation of the unknown.
Abhijit Naskar
#51. The whole [scientific] process resembles biological evolution. A problem is like an ecological niche, and a theory is like a gene or a species which is being tested for viability in that niche.
David Deutsch
#52. 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.
Stephen Hawking
#53. For reporting a scientific finding, I was called a 'conspiracy theorist.' Only in America is scientific analysis seen as conspiracy theory and government lies as truth.
Paul Craig Roberts
#54. I think that the theory of evolution is the most unscientific, faith-based, fundamentally brainless idea that ever had the misfortune to come out of a human mind. To compare it to true science is a joke. There is nothing even slightly scientific about it.
Ray Comfort
#55. But the scientific importance of a change in knowledge of fact consists precisely in j its having consequences for a system of theory.
Talcott Parsons
#56. Theory is the essence of facts. Without theory scientific knowledge would be only worthy of the madhouse.
Oliver Heaviside
#57. In chemistry, our theories are crutches; to show that they are valid, they must be used to walk ... A theory established with the help of twenty facts must explain thirty, and lead to the discovery of ten more.
Jean-Baptiste Dumas
#58. I will say to you what the scientists say about the small particles in the universe: I can't show you where they are, I can only show you where they were.
Anne Fortier
#59. When I was in high school, I was really into string theory and superstring theory and read 'Scientific American.' It's fascinating.
Sam Trammell
#60. But I think schools also ought to be fair to all views. Because, frankly, Darwinism is not an established scientific fact. It is a theory of evolution, that's why it's called the theory of evolution.
Mike Huckabee
#61. The evolution of higher and of lower forms of life is as well and as soundly established as the eternal hills. It has long since ceased to be a theory; it is a law of Nature as universal in living things as is the law of gravitation in material things and in the motions of the heavenly spheres.
Henry Fairfield Osborn
#62. Whereas a novice makes moves until he gets checkmated (proof), a Grand Master realizes 20 moves in advance that it's futile to continue playing (conceptualizing).
Bill Gaede
#63. Some claim evolution is just a theory. As if it were merely an opinion. The theory of evolution, like the theory of gravity, is a scientific fact. Evolution really happened. Accepting our kinship with all life on Earth is not only solid science. In my view, it's also a soaring spiritual experience.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#64. The witch theory of causality, and how it was debunked through science, encapsulates the larger trend in the improvement of humanity through the centuries by the gradual replacement of religious supernaturalism with scientific naturalism.
Michael Shermer
#65. [Modern scientific] theories can necessarily never be more than hypothetical, since their starting-point is wholly empirical, for facts in themselves are always susceptible of diverse explanations and so never have been and never will be able to guarantee the truth of any theory.
Rene Guenon
#66. At its best, management theory is part of the democratic promise of America. It aims to replace the despotism of the old bosses with the rule of scientific law. It offers economic power to all who have the talent and energy to attain it.
Matthew Stewart
#67. Historically speaking all - or very nearly all - scientific theories originate from myths.
Karl Popper
#68. Scientific views end in awe and mystery, lost at the edge in uncertainty, but they appear to be so deep and so impressive that the theory that it is all arranged as a stage for God to watch man's struggle for good and evil seems inadequate.
Richard P. Feynman
#69. The Theory of Relativity confers an absolute meaning on a magnitude which in classical theory has only a relative significance: the velocity of light. The velocity of light is to the Theory of Relativity as the elementary quantum of action is to the Quantum Theory: it is its absolute core.
Max Planck
#70. I tell personal stories associated with aspects of the theory, and I hope they are interesting and compelling. I don't feel you're going to change a grownup's mind in one reading. People have to be exposed to scientific ideas over and over again for years. It's also not a textbook.
Bill Nye
#71. I finally became convinced that the theory of creation actually had a much better scientific basis than the theory of evolution, for the creation model was actually better able to explain the physical and biological complexity in the world ...
Roy Spencer
#72. Evolutionary biologists have been able to pretend to know how complex biological systems originated only because they treated them as black boxes. Now that biochemists have opened the black boxes and seen what is inside, they know the Darwinian theory is just a story, not a scientific explanation.
Phillip E. Johnson
#73. Moreover, in the experimental sciences, the scientific fraternity must test a new theory to destruction, if possible.
Peter D. Mitchell
#74. 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
#75. The fact that some religious fanatics might support a theory doesn't invalidate it, anymore than the concurrence of UFO abduction cults invalidates the notion of extra-terrestrial life.
James P. Hogan
#76. I find that most people that zealously defend Darwin have not actually read Darwin; definitely not Darwin's second book, The Descent of Man.
A.E. Samaan
#77. Society would not tolerate legislation declaring that the theory that the sun circles the earth be given equal time with the theory of a heliocentric solar system; it should not pay attention to the equally preposterous notions of scientific creationism
Robert E. Ornstein
#78. I can now rejoice even in the falsification of a cherished theory, because even this is a scientific success.
John Carew
#79. It's hard to observe without imposing a theory to explain what we're seeing, but the trouble with theories, as Einstein said, is that they explain not only what is observed but what CAN BE observed. We start to build expectations based on our theories. And often those expectations get in the way.
Michael Crichton
#80. To me this is the most beautiful, the most satisfactory from a scientific standpoint, the most logical theory of life. For thirty years I have leaned toward the theory of Reincarnation. It seems a most reasonable philosophy and explains many things.
Henry Ford
#81. I am not offering God as a theory to compete with scientific theories about the universe. Rather I am saying that those self-contained, secular theories provide evidence for theologically neutral premises in philosophical arguments leading to a conclusion that has theistic significance.
William Lane Craig
#82. If you take Darwinian theory, make a 'scientific' principle out of it, put it into political action, then you have something like Nazi Germany.
Bruce Lipton
#83. Science is not about making predictions or performing experiments. Science is about explaining.
Bill Gaede
#84. The final outcome cannot be known, either to the originator of a new theory, or to his colleagues and critics, who are bent on falsifying it. Thus, the scientific innovator may feel all the more lonely and uncertain.
Peter D. Mitchell
#85. We are asked by science to believe that the entire universe sprang from nothingness, and at a single point and for no discernible reason. This notion is the limit case for credulity. In other words, if you can believe this, you can believe anything.
Terence McKenna
#86. A scientist first has to presuppose any theory based on available relevant data. In terms of such presupposition, a scientist begins his journey of scientific exploration as a philosopher.
Abhijit Naskar
#87. From the scientific view, the theory of karma may be a metaphysical assumption
but it is no more so than the assumption that all of life is material and originated out of pure chance
Dalai Lama XIV
#88. A hypothesis is empirical or scientific only if it can be tested by experience. A hypothesis or theory which cannot be, at least in principle, falsified by empirical observations and experiments does not belong to the realm of science.
Francisco J. Ayala
#89. Parkinson's Law is a purely scientific discovery, inapplicable except in theory to the politics of the day. It is not the business of the botanist to eradicate the weeds. Enough for him if he can tell us just how fast they grow.
C. Northcote Parkinson
#90. A mere inference or theory must give way to a truth revealed; but a scientific truth must be maintained, however contradictory it may appear to the most cherished doctrines of religion.
David Brewster
#91. The theory of man-made global warming and climate change based on human greenhouse gas emissions is the greatest international scientific fraud ever perpetrated on the world's citizens!
John Casey
#92. This theory [the oxygen theory] is not as I have heard it described, that of the French chemists, it is mine (elle est la mienne); it is a property which I claim from my contemporaries and from posterity.
Antoine Lavoisier
#93. Hydrodynamics procreated complex analysis, partial differential equations, Lie groups and algebra theory, cohomology theory and scientific computing.
Vladimir Arnold
#94. The theory of evolution, like the theory of gravity, is a scientific fact.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#95. The fundamental religious objection to the theory of evolution is not scientific but moral. [Fundamentalists believe that] evolutionary theory must be opposed because it leads to rampant immorality, on both the personal and political scales. The basic cause of this immorality is atheism.
Elizabeth S. Anderson
#96. Every theory presented as a scientific concept is just that; it's a theory that tries to explain more about the world than previous theories have done. It is open to being challenged and to being proven incorrect.
Marvin Harris
#97. Scientific knowledge is as much an understanding of the diversity of situations for which a theory or its models are relevant as an understanding of its limits.
Elinor Ostrom
#98. Before the 1940s the terms "system" and "systems thinking" had been used by several scientists, but it was Bertalanffy's concepts of an open system and a general systems theory that established systems thinking as a major scientific movement
Fritjof Capra
#99. Everything must be taken into account. If the fact will not fit the theory
let the theory go.
Agatha Christie
#100. Being used to scientific terminology and theory it was always natural for me to push this stuff into songs.
Peter Hammill
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