Cyprian Quotes
Custom, though never so ancient, without truth, is but an old error.
Cyprian of Carthage. "Epistle 73." The Ante-Nicene Fathers: Translations of the Writings of the Fathers Down to A.D. 325, Volume 5, edited by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, Christian Literature Company, 1886, p. 391.
A null hypothesis is a statistical scientific term that a researcher assumes and uses to compare other things to. If there are no significant, found differences, the null hypothesis is not rejected. If significant differences are found, then the null hypothesis (yesterday's truth) is then rejected. In science, no one has been right for 400 years since Aristotle. Truth is never eternal. It is continuously subjected to testing and conformation and history has shown that with new instruments, new techniques and new other findings to work from, sooner or later what we think is true today turns out to not quite be so. Often it is not completely wrong, but the old "truth" turns out to be not so in all cases or situations. For example, the mechanics of Isaac Newton was assumed for a few centuries to be true. Then along came Albert Einstein and he showed that Newton was right except when objects were traveling at very high speeds when Relativity explained them. And in less than one century, we realized that Einstein's Relativity explained everything except very small particles which are better explained by Quantum Mechanics. This process of will almost certainly continue.
The last sentence is the most frequent part of this quote. It is frequency prefaced with “Too often…” which is not part of the original quote.
Cyprian (Latin: Thascius Caecilius Cyprianus; ca. 210 to 14 September 258 AD) was a bishop of Carthage and an early Christian writer of Berber descent, many of whose Latin works are extant. He is recognized as a saint in the Western and Eastern churches.
