Theoretical Constructs Quotes

We are certainly not to relinquish the evidence of experiments for the sake of dreams and vain fictions of our own devising; nor are we to recede from the analogy of Nature, which is wont to be simple and always consonant to itself.

Arthur Young's Reflexive Universe - fascinating but too schematic to fit into my scheme. The most I could hope for was a sense of the vocabulary and some possible images.

Hypotheses are the scaffolds which are erected in front of a building and removedd when the building is completed. They are indispensable to the worker; but the worker must not mistake the scaffolding for the building.

If particulars are to have meaning, there must be universals.

Scientists often invent words to fill the holes in their understanding.These words are meant as conveniences until real understanding can be found. ... Words such as dimension and field and infinity ... are not descriptions of reality, yet we accept them as such because everyone is sure someone else knows what the words mean.

Mathematics is not something that you find lying around in your back yard. It's produced by the human mind. Yet if we ask where mathematics works best, it is in areas like particle physics and astrophysics, areas of fundamental science that are very, very far removed from everyday affairs.

And theories are no more than fictions which help us to make sense of experience and which are subject to disconfirmation when their explanations are no longer adequate.

In inventing a model we may assume what we wish, but should avoid impossibilities.

There is a very good saying that if triangles invented a god, they would make him three-sided.

Adam and Eve are like imaginary numbers, like the square root of minus one... If you include it in your equation, you can calculate all manners of things, which cannot be imagined without it.

It would not become physical science to see in its self created, changeable, economical tools, molecules and atoms, realities behind phenomena... The atom must remain a tool for representing phenomena.

Science is a dynamic undertaking directed to lowering the degree of the empiricism involved in solving problems; or, if you prefer, science is a process of fabricating a web of interconnected concepts and conceptual schemes arising from experiments and observations and fruitful of further experiments and observations.

Theories without facts may be barren, but facts without theories are meaningless.

What we call imagination is actually the universal library of what's real. You couldn’t imagine it if it weren’t real somewhere, sometime.

All that philosophers have handled for millennia has been conceptual mummies; nothing actual has ever escaped from their hands alive.

The supreme maxim in scientific philosophising is this: wherever possible, logical constructions are to be substituted for inferred entities.

There is no reason why an extraphysical general principle is necessarily to be avoided, since such principles could conceivably serve as useful working hypotheses. For the history of scientific research is full of examples in which it was very fruitful indeed to assume that certain objects or elements might be real, long before any procedures were known which would permit them to be observed directly.

The world is full of burled and gnarly knobs on which you can hang a metaphysical system. If you must.

Science is all metaphor.

The whole machinery of our intelligence, our general ideas and laws, fixed and external objects, principles, persons, and gods, are so many symbolic, algebraic expressions. They stand for experience; experience which we are incapable of retaining and surveying in its multitudinous immediacy. We should flounder hopelessly, like the animals, did we not keep ourselves afloat and direct our course by these intellectual devices. Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of fact.

That is, a system starts with a group of interrelated propositions which involve reference to empirical observations within the logical framework of the propositions in question.

Modern mathematics, that most astounding of intellectual creations, has projected the mind's eye through infinite time and the mind's hand into boundless space.

A work in which there are theories is like an object which still has the ticket that shows its price.

The world of conceptualized ideas is quite wonderful, even when it's - like Aristotle's Physics - an outmoded book. The physics is not true. But the reasoning is dazzling.

Scientific thought - indeed, any mode of thought, whether it be religious or philosophical or anything else - is just like the fashions that we wear - only much longer lived. It's a little like a boy band.