In this post, you will find great Theory Quotes from famous people, such as James Dyson, Sidney Altman, George Soros, Edward Witten, Jane Green. You can learn and implement many lessons from these quotes.
I’m not into politics but I am committed to a cause: ensuring design technology and engineering stays on the U.K. curriculum, alongside science and maths – grounding abstract theory, merging the practical with the academic.
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.
Every theory of love, from Plato down, teaches that each individual loves in the other sex what he lacks in himself.
I’m a bit of a romantic. In theory!
The beauty of any conspiracy theory is that because it can’t be proved, that just makes it more ‘real.’ It’s not a question of believing or not believing, really; it’s more a question of just accepting a series of probabilities that lead to an undeniable conclusion.
Beautiful Evidence is about the theory and practice of analytical design.
But the fact a person denies that he is theorising is no reason for taking him at his word and failing to investigate what implicit theory is involved in his statements.
For bedtime reading, I usually curl up with a good monograph on quantum physics or string theory, my specialty. But since I was a child, I have been fascinated by science fiction. My all-time favorite is ‘The Foundation Trilogy,’ by Isaac Asimov.
One of the most interesting things about the cognitive theory is the idea that anger and interpersonal conflict ultimately result from a mental con. In other words, you’re telling yourself things that aren’t entirely true when you’re fighting with someone.
In baseball, my theory is to strive for consistency, not to worry about the numbers. If you dwell on statistics you get shortsighted, if you aim for consistency, the numbers will be there at the end.
I start with theory rather than people. I don’t like novels which have no theoretical or philosophical underpinning. I hate the contemporary novel where people just sit and talk to each other about their relationships.
I was pretty lucky to get into Berklee at all. I never really had any theory or music-reading capabilities; I was completely by ear.
The implications of these considerations justify the statement that all empirically verifiable knowledge even the commonsense knowledge of everyday life – involves implicitly, if not explicitly, systematic theory in this sense.
Classic economic theory, based as it is on an inadequate theory of human motivation, could be revolutionized by accepting the reality of higher human needs, including the impulse to self actualization and the love for the highest values.
Internationalism is a community theory of society which is founded on economic, spiritual, and biological facts. It maintains that respect for a healthy development of human society and of world civilization requires that mankind be organized internationally.
We have confirmed something we only knew in theory, namely that revolution, in which uncontrolled and uncontrollable forces operate imperiously, is blind and destructive, grandiose and cruel.
If the facts don’t fit the theory, change the facts.
Quantum field theory was originally developed for the treatment of electrodynamics, immediately after the completion of quantum mechanics and the discovery of the Dirac equation.
The biggest thing is to create a product that consumers find useful. As more and more people like something, it becomes harder and harder to have a conspiracy theory about it.
I grew up in the heat of ’70s postmodern fiction and post-Godard films, and there was this idea that what mattered was the theory or meta in art.
The more we learn about life, the less plausible is any evolutionary theory that relies on blind, undirected, piece-by-piece change.
String theory is an attempt at a deeper description of nature by thinking of an elementary particle not as a little point but as a little loop of vibrating string.
The mathematical framework of quantum theory has passed countless successful tests and is now universally accepted as a consistent and accurate description of all atomic phenomena.
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.
Because of the Turing completeness theory, everything one Turing-complete language can do can theoretically be done by another Turing-complete language, but at a different cost. You can do everything in assembler, but no one wants to program in assembler anymore.
This is a great country, but fortunately for you, it is not perfect. There is much to be done to bring about complete equality. Remove hunger. Bring reality closer to theory and democratic principles.
Minimalism now is a reaction to what came before. It’s absolutely of its time. Music moved into the set theory thing, and moved out of it.
I call it like the domino theory of reality. If you can go one step at a time and it seems to make sense, you can then take your audience into an area that is relatively outlandish.
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.
Einstein wrestled with a problem back before we even knew the universe was expanding, and he was looking for a way to keep the universe from collapsing. And so he discovered, in his theory of gravity, something like this dark energy – he called it a cosmological constant – could play this role, pushing things away.
I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with a bank being big. In fact, there are some good arguments about universality of geography that in theory, if you have all your eggs in one little community, and some big employer goes out, that could be your downfall.
A bit, the smallest unit of information, the fundamental particle of information theory, is a choice, yes or no, on or off. It’s a choice that you can embody in electrical circuits, and it is thanks to that that we have all this ubiquitous computing.
My theory is this; I’m not a political songwriter. I’m an honest songwriter.
My theory was that what I had to do was make a study of human behavior.
I do not believe in censorship, but I believe we already have censorship in what is called marketing theory, namely the only information we get in mainstream media is for profit.
My theory about creativity is that the more money one has, the more creative one can be.
As you say, the way string theory requires all these extra dimensions and this comes from certain consistency requirements about how string should behave and so on.
Democracy, pure democracy, has at least its foundation in a generous theory of human rights. It is founded on the natural equality of mankind. It is the cornerstone of the Christian religion. It is the first element of all lawful government upon earth.
Evolutionary theory informs our understanding of some frankly inexcusable social behavior and renders it perfectly normal.
I think also of my colleagues in elementary particle theory in many lands, and feel that in some measure I am here as a representative of our small, informal, international fraternity.
We cannot even predict what kinds of emergent properties would appear when animals begin interacting as part of a brain-net. In theory, you could imagine that a combination of brains could provide solutions that individual brains cannot achieve by themselves.
Postmodernism is an academic theory, originating in academia with an academic elite, not in the world of women and men, where feminist theory is rooted.
In theory, cars are fairly simple. If they don’t start, it’s either the fuel system or the electrical system. Teach yourself about the path of each in your engine and tracing it is fairly straightforward. But at the beginning, mastering each new system seems like an unreachable shore. The car is effectively a black box.
Chuck Lorre and I had been talking about doing one of his shows for a while. I said I’d like to do ‘The Big Bang Theory,’ because I think it’s the best written, most intelligent show on television.
Given the devaluation of literature and of the study of foreign languages per se in the United States, as well as the preponderance of theory over text in graduate literature studies, creative writing programs keep literature courses populated.
In theory, people would pick progression every time over being idle. But if you look at us as a culture, as a people, you would say that if you get up at five o’clock in the morning, eat your breakfast, go to work, make money, pay your bills, you’re progressing, when you’re still doing what’s comfortable.
As an undergraduate at UBC in Canada, I fell in love with economic theory. It was the right choice for me.
I think there’s this essential human desire to have a unified field theory. Everyone is like, ‘I want to unlock the single secret to ‘Lost.’ There isn’t any one secret. There is not a unified field theory for ‘Lost,’ nor do we think there should be, because philosophically, we don’t buy into that as a conceit.
Whichever theory we adopt to give a rational explanation of human existence, that theory must take into account and explain the mental nature we see at work in all modern communities.
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.
The theory of relativity worked out by Mr. Einstein, which is in the domain of natural science, I believe can also be applied to the political field. Both democracy and human rights are relative concepts – and not absolute and general.
Time travel and teleportation will have to wait. It may take centuries to master these technology. But within the coming decades, we will understand dark matter, perhaps test string theory, find planets which can harbor life, and maybe have Brain 2.0, i.e. our consciousness on a disk which will survive even after we die.
The application of group theory to physics became one of the main branches of physics that I specialized in.
There could be no fairer destiny for any physical theory than that it should point the way to a more comprehensive theory in which it lives on as a limiting case.
String theory’s biggest prediction is that gravity exists. That’s good. That’s a lot more than preceding theories could do.
Men act like brutes in so far as the sequences of their perceptions arise through the principle of memory only, like those empirical physicians who have mere practice without theory.
My theory is that balance is key – nothing in excess.
Being exposed to theory, stimulated by a basic love of concepts and mathematics, was a marvelous experience.
Entropy theory, on the other hand, is not concerned with the probability of succession in a series of items but with the overall distribution of kinds of items in a given arrangement.
America traditionally represents the greatest possibility of someone’s going from nothing to something. Why? In theory, if not practice, the government stays out of the way and lets individuals take risks and reap rewards or accept the consequences of failure. We call this capitalism – or, at least, we used to.
The last hundred years have been retinal; even the cubists were. The surrealists tried to free themselves, and earlier so had the dadaists, but unfortunately, these latter were nihilists and didn’t produce enough to prove their point, which, by the way, they didn’t have to prove – according to their theory.
For years, my early work with Roger Penrose seemed to be a disaster for science. It showed that the universe must have begun with a singularity, if Einstein’s general theory of relativity is correct. That appeared to indicate that science could not predict how the universe would begin.
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.
No matter how beautiful the theory, one irritating fact can dismiss the entire formulism, so it has to be proven.
A good scientific theory is one which is falsifiable, which has not been falsified.
So long as we use a certain language, all questions that we can ask will have to be formulated in it and will thereby confirm the theory of the universe which is implied in the vocabulary and structure of the language.
A theory is no more like a fact than a photograph is like a person.
Never worry about theory as long as the machinery does what it’s supposed to do.
My theory of change is that there are already millions of people working day in and day out on the ground to deliver on promises on global change. We need to strengthen those institutions and help those people in the field.
I grow daily to honour facts more and more, and theory less and less. A fact, it seems to me, is a great thing; a sentence printed, if not by God, then at least by the Devil.
At the time, my personal research objectives were to provide Keynesian economics with more rigorous foundations and to tighten and elaborate the logic of macroeconomic and monetary theory.
People are always asking for the latest developments in the unification of this theory with that theory, and they don’t give us a chance to tell them anything about one of the theories that we know pretty well. They always want to know things that we don’t know.
I have a theory that there’s almost this primal viewpoint on women in the business, that once you’re beyond childbearing age, you are perceived as nonthreatening, nonsexual, noncastable. Sure, I already knew it before I got into it. I just didn’t know I’d end up making my living from low-budget, independent films.
I trained in psychiatry in the 1970s, and much of our training was about what was then psychoanalytic theory, with a little bit of theory from Jungian psychology and a few other places.
Any theory intended to describe and analyze socio-historical reality cannot restrict itself to the human spirit and disregard the totality of human nature.
Our concern, however, is with slavery as it is, and not with any theory of it.
Science is to find something unknown, while invention is to make something new out of the known theory.
Beck said he didn’t believe in the theory of a song coming through you as if you were an open vessel. I agree with him to a certain extent.
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
My theory on life is that life is beautiful. Life doesn’t change. You have a day, and a night, and a month, and a year. We people change – we can be miserable or we can be happy. It’s what you make of your life.
There’s a theory in gameplay, particularly in first person shooters, that sometimes you don’t want to have that much of a character because then it destroys the experience of the player being that character.
If it hadn’t worked out professionally, I would be teaching music theory and composition in a small college somewhere and playing drums in a jazz trio at the Holiday Inn on weekends, and I’d be happy there, too.
Tattoos are so widespread, so ugly and so very, very permanent. You can, in theory, have them removed – but a large chunk of your living flesh will go with it.
Normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none.
The state of the world, of course, is constantly changing, and so is theory.
To me, what makes physics physics is that experiment is intimately connected to theory. It’s one whole.
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.
After developing a primitive theory (1968) I therefore did not pursue this subject. However, the work was taken up by others and in 1974 the first experiments were done in the ISR.
There is a sort of theory that you should adapt bad books because they always make more successful films.
Only a spiritually bankrupt society could ever believe it. Only atheists could accept this Satanic theory.
I developed a theory that, in many ways, the early ‘Andy Griffith’ episodes especially were an awful lot like a Capra movie. They were a lot like ‘Mr. Deeds‘ or a lot like ‘It’s a Wonderful Life‘ in tone and presentation.
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.
In its first 30 years of existence, up to the mid 1970s, the practical applications of game theory were very limited, probably as a result of excessive preoccupation by game theorists with cooperative solution concepts.
As a conservative, I maintain a healthy skepticism of the theory of man-made global warming. I also believe that more people enjoying the fruits of modernity and economic development is a good thing – as long as those people arrived legally and obey the law.
There are certain people who elicit a really passionate response. It’s crazy. That’s my Alexander Wang theory.
There was one week where I got mistaken for Hasan Minhaj, who is on ‘The Daily Show;’ Kunal Nayyar, who’s on ‘Big Bang Theory;’ and Karan Soni of ‘Ghostbusters.’ This was one week.
We’ve got in the habit of not really understanding how freedom was in the 19th century, the idea of government of the people in the 19th century. America commits itself to that in theory.
The first issue to be settled is whether socialism has a right to exist Are its allegations concerning the present system true? Is industry proceeding on a principle of fraud? I wish to test the power of recent economic theory to give an exact answer to this question.
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is.
The predominant theory of the origin of the universe is the Big Bang.
It’s just a theory really, but I have always thought that your physical surroundings can shape your voice and personality.
I became interested in this question of whether you can build wormholes for interstellar travel. I realized that if you had a wormhole, the theory of general relativity by itself would permit you to go backward in time.
Sense data are much more controversial than qualia, because they are associated with a controversial theory of perception – that one perceives the world by perceiving one’s sense-data, or something like that.
The Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention argues that no two countries that are both part of the same global supply chain will ever fight a war as long as they are each part of that supply chain.
Relationships are like traffic lights. And I just have this theory that I can only exist in a relationship if it’s a green light.
You can’t run a business or anything else on a theory.
This is the problem for which revolutionary theory has yet to find the right solution, if there is one. The difficulty is that the economic interests of the two classes are antagonistic.
I love it now that a large minority of people who are handicapped prefer to call themselves crippled. This is all part of the game, like queer theory.
Most mental health professionals, including clinicians and researchers, endorse the deficit theory. They’re convinced that we wage war simply because we don’t know how to make love. We desperately want loving, satisfying relationships but lack the skills we need to develop them.
Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 % of them are wrong.
First literature came to refer only to itself, the literary theory.
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.
I don’t really believe in the auteur theory.
Theory did a great work pant, and everyone was doing denim. But no one was making a trouser sexy, or the focus of an outfit… So, that’s what I set out to do.
In the 19th century, smallpox was widely considered a disease of filth, which meant that it was largely understood to be a disease of the poor. According to filth theory, any number of contagious diseases were caused by bad air that had been made foul by excrement or rot.
The lesson of my field, behavioral economics, is that we need to understand the ways in which we differ from the rational human assumed in standard economic theory.
I have always thought that humanity was animal-like. The Confucian theory was man could be improved, but I’m not sure he can be. He can be trained; he can be disciplined.
I started out working on supersymmetry. The theory predicts that for every particle we know about, there will be an additional particle.
I developed the Clock Theory to help me time records; you know, spin the record back two revolutions or whatever and then play the break, spin the other one back two, play, like that.
What do women do when they get together? We sit around and talk! Men, not so much. My theory is that this difference is genetic and dates back to the hunter-gatherer societies, when the men had to be quiet as they hunted, lest they scare away the bison and then everyone starved to death and it was all their fault.
Richard Nixon, famously, conducted his foreign policy according to the ‘madman theory’: he tried to convince enemy leaders that he was irrational and volatile in an attempt to intimidate them. But this was a potentially useful approach to foreign policy only because it was an act.
My principal contribution to the Black-Scholes option-pricing theory was to show that the dynamic trading strategy prescribed by Black and Scholes to offset the risk exposure of an option would provide a perfect hedge in the limit of continuous trading.
I procrastinate in spades. In my defence, I also try to have all other distractions solved before I can concentrate on writing. My small theory is that to write for three hours, you need to feel like you have three days. To write for three days, you need to feel like you’ve got three weeks, and so on.
I don’t know anything about music theory at all. Zero. But I don’t really need to.
In theory, at least, all presidents are servants of the people who elected them. In the case of Barack Obama, it has seemed from the start that the idea as applied to him was more than mere metaphor. He is the first president in my lifetime whom the country felt obligated to remind that he know his place.
Architecture doesn’t come from theory. You don’t think your way through a building.
There are values of humanity, culture, beauty, community that may require deviations from the cold logic of market theory.
Evolution is a bankrupt speculative philosophy, not a scientific fact. Only a spiritually bankrupt society could ever believe it. Only atheists could accept this Satanic theory.
I have never believed in the Wizard of Oz theory of consulting, that I am all-knowing and all-seeing, and that everyone around me is kind of a backbencher.
If a philosophic theory is once ruled out of court, no one can tell when it will appear again.
Verbal and nonverbal activity is a unified whole, and theory and methodology should be organized or created to treat it as such.
I never had the time or luxury to think about inventing my own colour theory. When colour came, I was interested in expressing things that happened around me in time.
Our physiological constitution is obviously a product of Darwinian processes, insofar as you buy the evolutional theory as a generative, as an account of the mechanism that generated us. Our physiology evolved, our behaviors evolved, and our accounts of those behaviors, both successful and unsuccessful, evolved.
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.
I have a theory of living on the boundary: on the boundary of patriarchy and the boundary of different dimensions.
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.
Social Security was always supposed to be basically in theory an insurance program where you pay in and then you get out.
The monopoly of science in the realm of knowledge explains why evolutionary biologists do not find it meaningful to address the question whether the Darwinian theory is true.
I’ve got this theory that human beings are innately religious; we have a belief system. It doesn’t have to be a theist form, necessarily. But we need a belief system, some framework on which to hang our behavior.
It was very useful to learn the history, the theory, and the art of building from a practical background.
It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.
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.
The theory of Communism may be summed up in one sentence: Abolish all private property.
The Omega Point Theory can be a solid foundation of support for all of the great human religions.
I’m a big fan of simplicity, especially with songs and I try not to make them complicated. I just make them simple and let people absorb that message themselves. That’s my theory.
It really is a nice theory. The only defect I think it has is probably common to all philosophical theories. It’s wrong.
Today, the theory of evolution is an accepted fact for everyone but a fundamentalist minority, whose objections are based not on reasoning but on doctrinaire adherence to religious principles.
Scientists have no agreed theory of the origin of life – plenty of scenarios, conjectures and just-so stories, but nothing with solid experimental support.
The Gospel is not a theory; the Gospel is not a philosophy or an idea; the Gospel is not a way of thinking or feeling. The Gospel is an event in history.
I wanted as little formal linguistic theory as I could get by with. I wanted the basic linguistic training to do a translation of the New Testament.
I have this theory that your first film is always your best film in some way. I always try to get back to that moment when you’re not relying on things you’ve done before.
The absurd consequences of neglecting structure but using the concept of order just the same are evident if one examines the present terminology of information theory.
I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours.
What the string theorists do is arguably physics. It deals with the physical world. They’re attempting to make a consistent theory that explains the interactions we see among particles and gravity as well. That’s certainly physics, but it’s a kind of physics that is not yet testable.
Some wonder whether some day we will arrive at a theory of everything and run out of new problems to solve – much as the effort to explore the earth ran out of new continents to explore.
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.
Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.
The standard theory may survive as a part of the ultimate theory, or it may turn out to be fundamentally wrong. In either case, it will have been an important way-station, and the next theory will have to be better.
I think it’s imperative of me to advance that theory that you can win your small victories against the dark.
My theory is that one needs to be loved completely, unconditionally, and unfettered by parental disapproval, if one is to get happily through life which, after all, presents its own hurdles.
The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees in every object only the traits which favor that theory.
I have a theory that if you’ve got the kind of parents who want to send you to boarding school, you’re probably better off at boarding school.
Moreover, in the experimental sciences, the scientific fraternity must test a new theory to destruction, if possible.
One lesson I learned from ‘The Monstrumologist’ was never to get too attached to your own characters. That’s harder in practice than in theory. At the end of the third book – which coincided with the end of my contract – I was an emotional wreck. I mourned Will Henry and Warthrop.
Success is not a matter of mastering subtle, sophisticated theory but rather of embracing common sense with uncommon levels of discipline and persistence.
The uncertainty principle refers to the degree of indeterminateness in the possible present knowledge of the simultaneous values of various quantities with which the quantum theory deals; it does not restrict, for example, the exactness of a position measurement alone or a velocity measurement alone.
Every non-Marxist economic theory that treats human and non-human productive inputs as interchangeable assumes that the dehumanisation of human labour is complete. But if it could ever be completed, the result would be the end of capitalism as a system capable of creating and distributing value.
Information theory began as a bridge from mathematics to electrical engineering and from there to computing.
The whole social media thing is ridiculous. Everybody gets to say what they want all the time. That’s fine in theory, but it’s not civilised. Imagine going into a bar, and everybody in that bar is talking like people do online. They’d just get their teeth punched in.
I take the view that we all have permission to be a little baffled by quantum information science and algorithmic information theory.
Many studies or theories by political scientists fit some subset of cases that a court decides, but literally no theory can account for all of them, particularly when it comes to studying a complex institution like the Supreme Court.
There is no falsification before the emergence of a better theory.
The proposition that humans have mental characteristics wholly absent in non-humans is inconsistent with the theory of evolution.
A major fault, for example, is the fact that, along with the materialist principle, Darwin introduced into his theory of evolution reactionary Malthusian ideas.
I don’t think anybody’s really been successful with theorizing about value or creating a price theory.
Ask me not, ‘Are you rightwing,’ but ask me ‘Are you a committed believer in individual freedom, the values of the enlightenment?’ Then, yeah, if being rightwing means believing Adam Smith was right, both in the ‘Wealth of Nations’ and the ‘Theory of Moral Sentiments,’ then I’m rightwing.
Einstein’s theory of relativity does a fantastic job for explaining big things. Quantum mechanics is fantastic for the other end of the spectrum – for small things.
The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity.
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.
You have to know evolution to understand the natural world. And that cannot be a threat to people of faith. There’s a serious problem if you are forced by your faith to reject the most well-supported theory in all of science.
If even in science there is no a way of judging a theory but by assessing the number, faith and vocal energy of its supporters, then this must be even more so in the social sciences: truth lies in power.
I had become interested in economics, an interest that was transformed into a lifetime dedication when I met with the mathematical theory of general economic equilibrium.
My number-one theory in life is that style is proportional to your lack of resources – the less you have, the more stylish you’re likely to be.
Hemingway‘s short story ‘Hills Like White Elephants‘ is a classic of its kind. It illustrates Hemingway’s ‘iceberg theory,’ which requires that a story find its effectiveness by hiding more than it reveals.
The theory of cultural bias… is the idea that a culture is based on a particular form of organization. It can’t be transplanted except to another variant of that organization.
It’s my theory that many writers were the confidantes of one or the other parent. I was my mother’s confidante; she had been her mother’s confidante.
I don’t like writing essays or theory.
The principal axiom in their theory was: Everything can be proved, and everything can be disproved; and in the process, one must profit as much from the folly of others, and from his own superiority, as he can.
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.
You have to connect your work to what people are doing. A good way is to construct a bridge between theory and practice – Amartya Sen and I tried this by founding the Human Development and Capabilities Association where practitioners meet theoreticians and their discourse influences practice.
If we do discover a complete theory, it should be in time understandable in broad principle by everyone. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people be able to take part in the discussion of why we and the universe exist.
‘The Big Bang Theory’ has completely changed my life.
My object will be, first, to show by what connections the history of the fossil bones of land animals is linked to the theory of the earth and why they have a particular importance in this respect.
The Galapagos Islands are probably the most famous wildlife-watching destination in the world. And no wonder – it’s almost impossible to exaggerate the sheer spectacle of the place that provided inspiration for Charles Darwin’s ground-breaking theory of natural selection.
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.
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.
In theory there is a possibility of perfect happiness: To believe in the indestructible element within one, and not to strive towards it.
I’ve never really been schooled in music theory. I’m a guitar player, and I attack the guitar in a certain way that it not fully unique to me, but it’s more unique that some other people.
You know, I’m not big on conspiracy theory. It does really kind of get my blood going when I find out there really are conspiracies that actually happened.
Future generations of economists will look at the trickle-down theory in much the same way we now look at witch burning, slavery, and the Sinclair C5.
The media thinks that only the cutting edge of science, the very latest controversies, are worth reporting on. How often do you see headlines like ‘General Relativity still governing planetary orbits’ or ‘Phlogiston theory remains false’? By the time anything is solid science, it is no longer a breaking headline.
The Theory of Groups is a branch of mathematics in which one does something to something and then compares the result with the result obtained from doing the same thing to something else, or something else to the same thing.
I think when you’re learning an instrument, you are restricted because much of it is the noise of individual theory and your ability to play the instrument.
Each child is biologically required to have a mother. Fatherhood is a well-regarded theory, but motherhood is a fact.
Cognitive psychology has shown that the mind best understands facts when they are woven into a conceptual fabric, such as a narrative, mental map, or intuitive theory. Disconnected facts in the mind are like unlinked pages on the Web: They might as well not exist.
I have a theory… that someplace at the heart of most compelling stories is something that doesn’t make sense.
My job was to teach the whole corpus of economic theory, but there were two subjects in which I was especially interested, namely, the economics of mass unemployment and international economics.
When I arrived at Harvard, I wanted to design a course in political theory that would have interested me, back when I was started out, in a way that the standard things didn’t.
There is the theory… that you live in two places: You either live in fear, or you live in love.
The theory of mechanism design can be thought of as the ‘engineering’ side of economic theory.
My emotional investment is in finding truth. If string theory is wrong, I’d like to have known that yesterday. But if we can show it today or tomorrow, fantastic.
There are a lot of good things about string theory, and it’s great that some people want to work on it.
When I went to art school in Romania, we learned the Golden Ratio Technique Theory, which taught us that when you draw a portrait and want to show an emotion, you change the eyebrows. They are the most important feature on the face.
From this bestial view that the human mind consists of only sense certainty, pleasure and pain, Locke developed an equally bestial theory of the nation. Man originally existed in a State of Nature of complete liberty.
Whenever you have dynamic interactions between 300 million people and the American economy acting in really complex ways, that introduces a degree of almost chaos theory to the system, in a literal sense.
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.
There are two books that I often travel with; one is ‘The Theory on Moral Sentiments’ by Adam Smith. The other is ‘The Meditations.’ It’s not that I agree with either views expressed in the books, but I believe ideas and thoughts of older generations can offer food for thought for the current generation.
There is no body of theory or significant body of relevant information, beyond the comprehension of the layman, which makes policy immune from criticism.
Postman is a media analyst and his theory is that television doesn’t influence our culture, but that it is our culture and the presidency and anything that relies on television.
It is an acknowledged truth in philosophy that a just theory will always be confirmed by experiment.
Blind commitment to a theory is not an intellectual virtue: it is an intellectual crime.
My favorite laser disk ever was the laser disk for The Graduate, which had a commentary track that wasn’t even the filmmakers, it was a professor, some film criticism guy who just happen to be this amazing commentator who went off into the whole theory of comedy.
Socialism may have failed as an economic theory, but global warming alarmism, with its dire warnings about the consequences of industry and consumerism, is equally a rebuke to capitalism.
The dominant theory coming out of Hollywood is that peoples’ attention spans are getting shorter and shorter and they need more stimulation.
I think it is widely agreed that Carl Steinitz, over the 50 years he taught at Harvard, has been one of the most important figures in influencing the theory and practice of landscape architecture and the application of computer technology to planning.
My theory is, if you can do comedy and you can be in a scene with someone like Brad Garrett and hold your own, you’ve really got a future in this business.
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.
Filibusters should require 35 senators to… make a commitment to continually debate an issue in reality, not just in theory. The number of votes needed to overcome a filibuster should be reduced to 55 from 60.
In 1958, Anne and I returned to Australia, where I got a very attractive research position at the Australian National University in Canberra. But soon I felt very isolated because at that time game theory was virtually unknown in Australia.
When we first started ‘The Big Bang Theory,’ I would get incredibly nervous because it’s such a big show and I was just out of graduate school. I’d come in and have this huge responsibility for the one line that everyone hopes will bring down the house.
Although the theory of relativity makes the greatest of demands on the ability for abstract thought, still it fulfills the traditional requirements of science insofar as it permits a division of the world into subject and object (observer and observed) and, hence, a clear formulation of the law of causality.
That’s where I get my whole music theory from, my pops and my grandfather.
Electromagnetic theory and experiment gave us the telephone, radio, TV, computers, and made the internal combustion engine practical – thus, the car and airplane, leading inevitably to the rocket and outer-space exploration.
They who have reasoned ignorantly, or who have aimed at effecting their personal ends by flattering the popular feeling, have boldly affirmed that ‘one man is as good as another;’ a maxim that is true in neither nature, revealed morals, nor political theory.
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.
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.
My theory is children don’t do what you tell them to do, they do what you do. You have to always do the right thing because they follow you.
I have a theory that the secret of marital happiness is simple: drink in different pubs to your other half.
My theory of hitting was just to watch the ball as it came in and hit it.
I am trained as a psychologist, and I think of all human issues in terms of psychology, neuroscience, genetics, and evolutionary theory.
I’m not that well-versed in literary theory – I don’t know what it is.
Don’t confuse hypothesis and theory. The former is a possible explanation; the latter, the correct one. The establishment of theory is the very purpose of science.
Vietnam was a lie but at least there was a political agenda. It was the domino theory. Iraq is about nothing but George Bush‘s ego laced with imperialist ambitions. And it was helped by your government.
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.’
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
There is no complete theory of anything.
I just think too many nice things have happened in string theory for it to be all wrong. Humans do not understand it very well, but I just don’t believe there is a big cosmic conspiracy that created this incredible thing that has nothing to do with the real world.
Bolshevism may be Marxian in theory, but it is Hulagoesque in practice. It may be of European descent, but it is Oriental in tradition. Oriental in mood. Oriental in temperament.
I have a theory that the best ads come from personal experience. Some of the good ones I have done have really come out of the real experience of my life, and somehow this has come over as true and valid and persuasive.
There was a long history of speculation that in quantum gravity, unlike Einstein’s classical theory, it might be possible for the topology of spacetime to change.
Notwithstanding these major arguments the wave theory initially did not meet with complete acceptance.
A valid scientific theory is predictive, verifiable, and replicable. To me, that’s beautiful.
I studied chord theory and started playing the piano.
We could solve all our problems if only we were the efficient, rational human beings of standard economic theory and had politicians willing to think in the long-term interest of their people rather than their own.
I don’t only write about English literature; I also write about chaos theory and… ants. I can understand ants.
One of the best predictors of policy around is Thomas Ferguson‘s investment theory of politics, as he calls it – very outstanding political economist – which essentially – I mean, to say it in a sentence, he describes elections as occasions in which groups of investors coalesce and invest to control the state.
Most of the stuff I learned to play, I learned in high school. I had a band in high school, a jazz-fusion thing, and I was the keyboard player. I was interested in how the instruments worked and the theory behind playing with them.
People who get together, regardless of other structures, will find something in common. They are bound to. That was the Pete Seeger let’s-all-sing theory.
What I always try to do is to respond to the song; I’ve always rebelled against theory.
My theory is that big underwear makes big girls look bigger.
In so far as such a theory is empirically correct it will also tell us what empirical facts it should be possible to observe in a given set of circumstances.
I wouldn’t have thought that a wrong theory should lead us to understand better the ordinary quantum field theories or to have new insights about the quantum states of black holes.
I write music that sounds complex but isn’t. I frankly never think in terms of theory.
The problem with feature filmmaking is that it offers you this mirage of being able to achieve perfection, as the theory of it is that you have control of every part of the film, though in reality, it is as inexact as the next thing in your life.
When the basic status of a theory is clear, and all that needs to be cleared are details, you can collaborate. But if the main structure of a hypothesis isn’t established, and you want to change the paradigm – like it was the case in the 1960s – it’s better to work alone.
Statistics: the mathematical theory of ignorance.
One of the big take-aways from a lot of economic theory is that people should engage in consumption smoothing.
The greatest mathematicians, as Archimedes, Newton, and Gauss, always united theory and applications in equal measure.
In the early days of the video game business, everybody played. The question is, what happened? My theory – and I think it’s pretty well borne out – is that in the ’80s, games got gory, and that lost the women. And then they got complex, and that lost the casual gamer.
‘The General Theory’ was not truly revolutionary at all but merely old and oft-refuted mercantilist and inflationist fallacies dressed up in shiny new garb, replete with newly constructed and largely incomprehensible jargon.
The theory in great families was ‘why work if you don’t have to.’ Being a public figure was reserved for movie stars.
At MIT, I had the good fortune for seven years to teach network theory, which is basic to many disciplines, to one-third of the undergraduate student body. It was an experiment to see how high we could bring their level of understanding, and it exceeded all of my expectations.
String theory is not the only theory that can accommodate extra dimensions, but it certainly is the one that really demands and requires it.
Literary theory has become a parody of science, generating its own arcane jargon. In the process, tragically, it discourages love of literature for its own sake.
The scaling theory of localization demonstrated that the disorder-induced M-I transition was a true phase transition with a well defined critical point.
A mathematical theory is not to be considered complete until you have made it so clear that you can explain it to the first man whom you meet on the street.
We were an ill-matched pair, my husband and I, from the very outset; he, with very high ideas of a husband’s authority and a wife‘s submission, holding strongly to the ‘master-in-my-own-house theory,’ thinking much of the details of home arrangements, precise, methodical, easily angered and with difficulty appeased.
According to the now almost universally accepted theory, all the races of mankind had a common origin.
The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners.
I went to the University of Toronto to study the history and theory of film, in the back of my mind thinking I’d go to NYU film school and see if I could make a career of it.
I know that a good many champions have entertained the thought that the more they discourage youngsters, the longer they would reign. However, this theory never impressed me, and I always made it a point to give youths the benefit of my experience in bicycle racing.
I really wish there was some big brother conspiracy theory. I just think it’s the ignorance of trying to make a dollar. That’s what the networks have done and will continue to do. If anyone doesn’t think that this is about making money, then they’re crazy.
My mother was an economics professor. I’m proficient in math, and statistics, game theory, symbolic logic and all of that.
The paradigm of physics – with its interplay of data, theory and prediction – is the most powerful in science.
Ultimately, my Ph.D. is in mathematical physics, focusing on quantum field theory and curved space-time, and I worked with Stephen Hawking.
I just never subscribed to the theory that at age 55, you fall off the face of the earth on the Tour. I always felt that was too young of an age for that.
Christianity is not a theory or speculation, but a life; not a philosophy of life, but a life and a living process.
Never abandon a theory that explains something until you have a theory that explains more.
I was born in 1960, and space theory, especially in the last part of that time and going into the ’70s, space was very relevant at that time. It was on television – all the experiments, the moon landings, everything like that.
In theory I am an agnostic, but pending the appearance of rational evidence, I must be classed, practically and provisionally, as an atheist.
Game theory is a branch of, originally, applied mathematics, used mostly in economics and political science, a little bit in biology, that gives us a mathematical taxonomy of social life, and it predicts what people are likely to do and believe others will do in cases where everyone’s actions affect everyone else.
The world runs on individuals pursuing their self interests. The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus. Einstein didn’t construct his theory under order from a, from a bureaucrat. Henry Ford didn’t revolutionize the automobile industry that way.
I can observe the game theory is applied very much in economics. Generally, it would be wise to get into the mathematics as much as seems reasonable because the economists who use more mathematics are somehow more respected than those who use less. That’s the trend.
Theory is splendid but until put into practice, it is valueless.
Being used to scientific terminology and theory it was always natural for me to push this stuff into songs.
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.
String Theory describes energy and matter as being composed of tiny, wiggling strands of energy that look like strings. And the pitch of a string’s vibration determines the nature of its effect.
I have a theory: I believe that with the advent of the United States and the lawful definition of marriage, it was defined as between one man and one woman. It was anti-polygamy, in effect saying no man can hoard his women.
The Internet is a really big tent. In theory, it can support the full range of models, one of which is, ‘Here’s my information and I’m happy you can use it,’ and the other one is, ‘Here’s the information and you can’t have it unless you pay me for it,’ and perhaps some things in-between. There is a full spectrum of models.
My brother and I have always had this theory that, as stupid as it sounds, in video games, there is a certain hand-eye coordination and a thought process that you can learn.
I have a theory and I really believe it. I think your worst weakness can become your greatest single strength.
People have made a living deconstructing Lennon and The Beatles songs because of their compositional sophistication. But what’s so exciting about John is that he never had any of that training on musical theory; something just spoke to him, and he just knew what sounded right.
I have this theory- that if we’re told we’re bad, then that’s the only ideal we’ll ever have.
In 1956, when I began doing theoretical physics, the study of elementary particles was like a patchwork quilt. Electrodynamics, weak interactions, and strong interactions were clearly separate disciplines, separately taught and separately studied. There was no coherent theory that described them all.
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.
It’s hard to do that with people who think emotionally. A lot of people think in terms of people, emotions, and feelings. That’s more complicated. Engineering mentality makes it, in theory, a little easier.
As the new endogenous growth theory suggests, TFP growth is closely related to accumulation of the intangible capitals, such as human capital and research and development.
The methodologies of examining hip hop are borrowed from sociology, politics, religion, economics, urban studies, journalism, communications theory, American studies, transatlantic studies, black studies, history, musicology, comparative literature, English, linguistics, and other disciplines.
There can be theory but, you know, the problem is you’ve got to be able to test it. So theories are one thing, testing is another.
My roommate at Yale University introduced me to the auteur theory of filmmaking. I soon became a big fan of the works of John Ford, Kenji Mizoguchi, Ernst Lubitsch, and Stan Brakhage. I then decided to make my own films!
Maybe we should teach schoolchildren probability theory and investment risk management.
I always argued against the auteur theory; films are a collaborative art form. I’ve had some fantastically good people help me make the movies.
In order to govern, the question is not to follow out a more or less valid theory but to build with whatever materials are at hand. The inevitable must be accepted and turned to advantage.
One very important aspect of string theory is definitely testable. That was the prediction of supersymmetry, which emerged from string theory in the early ’70s.
Theory not only formulates what we know but also tells us what we want to know, that is, the questions to which an answer is needed.
Darwin based his theory on generalizations that were strictly empirical. You can go out and see that organisms do vary, that variations are inherited, and that every organism is capable of increasing its numbers in sufficiently favorable circumstances.
My theory about why Hemingway killed himself is that he heard his own voice; that he reached the point where he couldn’t write without feeling he was repeating himself. That’s the worst thing that can happen to a writer.
Essential to the theory of evolution is the premise that everything has come into being by itself.
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.
You can convince yourself of just about anything when you want to believe a conspiracy theory.
My theory is to enjoy life, but the practice is against it.
I’d say many features of string theory don’t mesh with what we observe in everyday life.
My theory is to let everyone in on what works and let the best man win.
As Development Secretary, I have seen in the developing world that climate change there is not a theory, is not a future threat: it is a contemporary crisis.
I’m not sure what theory is, unless it’s the pursuit of fundamental questions.
I think almost all strategic problems could at least be improved upon if people would do more careful game-theoretic analysis. The reason game theory works in predicting is because people intuit how to behave game-theoretically.
The quality of instruction is very high at the Silverlake Conservatory of Music. It’s not about being a rock star. It’s about the fundamentals of music, theory and technique on a particular instrument, and playing in an ensemble or private setting.
I learned to play by ear before I learned music theory. For me, that makes sense. After all, children learn to speak before they read and write. The more you understand of music – how harmony and time signatures work, and what chords and inversions are – the more you’ll enjoy it.
Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.
The masses will reject any theory, however reasonable it may be, if it lays a restriction upon the appetite.
Many scholars working in the humanities have already shown interest in brain research. For years, contemporary theory in the humanities has left the body and biology out of their discussions.
To understand the theory which underlies all things is not sufficient. Theory is but the preparation for practice.
The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals.
In 1989, I was awarded the Von Neumann Prize in Operations Research Theory by the Operations Research Society of America and The Institute of Management Sciences. They cited my works in the areas of portfolio theory, sparse matrix techniques and the SIMSCRIPT programming language.
The broader the chess player you are, the easier it is to be competitive, and the same seems to be true of mathematics – if you can find links between different branches of mathematics, it can help you resolve problems. In both mathematics and chess, you study existing theory and use that to go forward.
Obama, startled that components of government behave as interest groups, seems utterly unfamiliar with public choice theory. It demystifies and de-romanticizes politics by applying economic analysis – how incentives influence behavior – to government.
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?
The idea that human beings have changed and are changing the basic climate system of the Earth through their industrial activities and burning of fossil fuels – the essence of the Greens‘ theory of global warming – has about as much basis in science as Marxism and Freudianism.
The intersection of political analysis and Internet theory is a busy crossroad of cliche, where familiar rhetorical vehicles – decentralized authority, emergent leadership, empowered grass roots – create a ceaseless buzz.
The ‘science’ for which the United States is respected has nothing to do with the unscientific and baseless theory of evolution.
The Marxist theory of ideology is extremely contentious, not least because it is tied to socio-economic hypotheses that are no longer believable.
Agricultural practice served Darwin as the material basis for the elaboration of his theory of Evolution, which explained the natural causation of the adaptation we see in the structure of the organic world. That was a great advance in the knowledge of living nature.
Religion is not theory – it is life. It is not intellectual conviction – it is divine humanity, and nothing else.
Germ theory, which secularized infectious disease, had a side effect: it sacralized epidemiology.
We don’t see very far in the future, we are very focused on one idea at a time, one problem at a time, and all these are incompatible with rationality as economic theory assumes it.
Business book writing for me is when some set of ideas gets stuck in my mind, I write a book about it. I haven’t got a theory and I haven’t got a framework.
There is a gulf between the high value Americans put on life in theory and its cheapness in practice.
A good theory explains a lot but postulates little.
The oldest theory of contract is I think negative.
You don’t attack the grunts of Vietnam; you blame the theory behind the war. Nobody who fought in that war was at fault. It was the war itself that was at fault. It’s the same thing with psychotherapy.
The road to energy efficiency is, in theory, a sustainability sweepstake. More efficiency means that less fuel is required to generate a given amount of energy, which in turn means lower costs for the provider and cheaper prices for the customers.
I have a theory that confidence comes from self-worth.
My interest in economics has always been in the whole corpus of economic theory, the interrelationships between the various fields of theory and their relevance for the formulation of economic policy.
Without a revolutionary theory there cannot be a revolutionary movement.
The end of science is not to prove a theory, but to improve mankind.
But the nature of my main work in chemistry can be better represented by more than 280 English publications, of which roughly 200 concern the theory of chemical reactions and related subjects.
The scientists often have more unfettered imaginations than current philosophers do. Relativity theory came as a complete surprise to philosophers, and so did quantum mechanics, and so did other things.
Journalists typically don’t carry weapons, even in war zones, for fear of compromising their status as neutral observers. If you’re armed, the theory goes, other armed people will consider you a target.
Practical wisdom is only to be learned in the school of experience. Precepts and instruction are useful so far as they go, but, without the discipline of real life, they remain of the nature of theory only.
I never had a policy about marriage. I got married very young in life and I always think in all relationships, I’ve always thought that it’s counterproductive to have a theory on that.
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.
You can track elections by who was playing that president on ‘SNL‘ at that time. There’s the theory that the more likable or charismatic impression would help get the president elected.
Children live in the only successful Marxist state ever created: the family. ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his need’ is the family’s practice as well as its theory. Even with today’s scattershot patterns of marriage and parenting, a family is collectivist to a more than North Korean degree.
Nevertheless, the realization that breaking a pencil point would have far less disastrous consequences played little or no role, I believe, in this decision to explore theory!
The original and brilliant idea of an MBA was the opportunity for students to study the theory and application of business and management principles.
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.
Indeed, this epistemological theory of the relation between theory and experiment differs sharply from the epistemological theory of naive falsificationism.
To me, the writer’s main job is to just make the story unscroll in such a way that the reader is snared – she’s right there, seeing things happen and caring about them. And if you dedicate yourself to this job, the meanings more or less take care of themselves. That’s the theory, anyway.
In 2002, a Scottish journalist, during a dinner meant to be private, absolutely wanted me to react to Stephen Hawking’s comments. I said one shouldn’t pay too much attention to what Hawking was saying because he was a celebrity but not a specialist of elementary particle theory.
The piano is a universal instrument. If you start there, learn your theory and how to read, you can go on to any other instrument.
I’ve never been much for theory and scales.
Freud was a hero. He descended to the Underworld and met there stark terrors. He carried with him his theory as a Medusa’s head which turned these terrors to stone.
My theory is that comedy comes from little people.
We were environmentalists of the Teddy Roosevelt theory. We believed in separation of church and state. We believed in the independence of the Supreme Court not being subject to politicians.
Darwin didn’t walk around the Galapagos and come up with the theory of evolution. He was exploring, collecting, making observations. It wasn’t until he got back and went through the samples that he noticed the differences among them and put them in context.
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.
My theory is, independent movies only work if you’re willing to push the material and do something different.
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.
I started classes and it wasn’t because I was like, ‘I want to be an actor!’ – I was really interested in the theory of what acting can be and what it’s about. It’s all about living in the moment and kind of being present, which is something that at that time in my life I really wanted to explore.
I have a theory that burnout is about resentment. And you beat it by knowing what it is you’re giving up that makes you resentful.
In a democracy, supposedly we hold power by what we do at the ballot box, so therefore the more we know about political power the better our choices should be and the better, in theory, our democracy should be.
We don’t have a solid theory of how the universe originated, but that doesn’t mean we have to invoke a deity.
All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it.
According to String Theory, what appears to be empty space is actually a tumultuous ocean of strings vibrating at the precise frequencies that create the 4 dimensions you and I call height, width, depth and time.
Growth theory did not begin with my articles of 1956 and 1957, and it certainly did not end there. Maybe it began with ‘The Wealth of Nations’; and probably even Adam Smith had predecessors.
When we understand string theory, we will know how the universe began. It won’t have much effect on how we live, but it is important to understand where we come from and what we can expect to find as we explore.
I have this theory that, depending on your attitude, your life doesn’t have to become this ridiculous charade that it seems so many people end up living.
Meanwhile, the originator of a theory may have a very lonely time, especially if his colleagues find his views of nature unfamiliar, and difficult to appreciate.
The Republican Party is doubling down on this trickle-down theory that says, ‘Thou shalt concentrate wealth at the very top of our society. Thou shalt remove regulation from wherever you find it, even on Wall Street. And thou shalt keep wages low for American workers so that we can be more competitive.’
Journalism was being whittled away by a Wall Street theory that profits can be maximized by minimizing the product.
It’s perfectly obvious that there is some genetic factor that distinguishes humans from other animals and that it is language-specific. The theory of that genetic component, whatever it turns out to be, is what is called universal grammar.
I have this theory that alpha males are actually not alpha males. They’re actually very scared – particularly scared of competition from a lot of men.
It is true that in quantum theory we cannot rely on strict causality. But by repeating the experiments many times, we can finally derive from the observations statistical distributions, and by repeating such series of experiments, we can arrive at objective statements concerning these distributions.
So when you ask me how string theory might be tested, I can tell you what’s likely to happen at accelerators or some parts of the theory that are likely to be tested.
Indeed, the history of 20th century physics was in large measure about how to avoid the infinities that crop up in particle theory and cosmology. The idea of point particles is convenient but leads to profound, puzzling troubles.
The classics of Marxism, while fully appreciating the significance of the Darwinian theory, pointed out the errors of which Darwin was guilty. Darwin’s theory, though unquestionably materialist in its main features, is not free from some serious errors.
And capital punishment, however ineffective it may be and through whatever ignorance it may be resorted to, is a strictly defensive act, – at least in theory.
In theory, parents are supposed to empathize with one other – find common cause in the fervent desire to preserve and protect the world for the next generation, and connect on some deep, almost mystical level that those poor souls who have not experienced this kind of all-consuming love cannot possibly comprehend.
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.
The human species, according to the best theory I can form of it, is composed of two distinct races, the men who borrow and the men who lend.
I joined the Army and was sent to the MIT radiation laboratory after a few months of introduction to electromagnetic wave theory in a special course, given for Army personnel at the University of Chicago.
To an intellectual who is adrift in politics, a theory is an aim; to a true politician his theory is a boundary.
There’s a thing called the ‘One Drop’ theory in African-American culture, which is if you have one drop of black blood in you, you’re black.
The classical theory of omniscient rationality is strikingly simple and beautiful.
Einstein, in the special theory of relativity, proved that different observers, in different states of motion, see different realities.
Probability is expectation founded upon partial knowledge. A perfect acquaintance with all the circumstances affecting the occurrence of an event would change expectation into certainty, and leave nether room nor demand for a theory of probabilities.
Land: A part of the earth’s surface, considered as property. The theory that land is property subject to private ownership and control is the foundation of modern society, and is eminently worthy of the superstructure.
I did several types of work about several investigations of application of game theory to international relations.
There certainly is a tension between the relativity of simultaneity and non-locality in quantum theory, but it’s not strong enough to add up to a falsification of either side by itself.
Now the truth of the matter is that there are a lot of things people don’t understand. Take the Einstein theory. Take taxes. Take love. Do you understand them? Neither do I. But they exist. They happen.
The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living, and the get-rich-quick theory of life.
I had some hesitations about philosophy because, if you worked out a philosophical theory, it was hard to know whether you were going to be able to prove it or whether other theories had just as good a claim on belief.
Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.
Astronomers have been bewildered by the theory of an expanding universe, but there is no less expansion in the moral infinite of the universe of man. As far as the frontiers of science are pushed back, over the extended arc of these frontiers one will hear the poet’s hounds on the chase.
I hesitate to predict whether this theory is true. But if the general opinion of Mankind is optimistic then we’re in for a period of extreme popularity for science fiction.
