Quotes about Theory

The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees in every object only the traits which favor that theory.

It is better to emit a scream in the shape of a theory than to be entirely insensible to the jars and incongruities of life and take everything as it comes in a forlorn stupidity.

Today, the concrete data point strongly in the direction of the God hypothesis. . . . Those who wish to oppose it have no testable theory to marshal, only speculations about unseen universes spun from fertile scientific imagination. . . . Ironically, the picture of the universe bequeathed to us by the most advanced twentieth-century science is closer in spirit to the vision presented in the Book of Genesis than anything offered by science since Copernicus.27

A theory is something nobody believes, except the person who made it. An experiment is something everybody believes, except the person who made it.

The supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a simple datum of experience.

A theory is more impressive the greater the simplicity of its premises, the more different are the kinds of things it relates, and the more extended its range of applicability.

How did it come to pass that I was the one to develop the theory of relativity? The reason, I think, is that a normal adult never stops to think about problems of space and time. These are things which he has thought of as a child. But my intellectual development was retarded, as a result of which I began to wonder about space and time only when I had already grown up. Naturally I could go deeper into the problem than a child with normal abilities.

Every theory is killed sooner or later in that way. But if the theory has good in it, that good is embodied and continued in the next theory.

The more success the quantum theory has, the sillier it looks. How nonphysicists would scoff if they were able to follow the odd course of developments!

The [quantum] theory reminds me a little of the system of delusions of an exceedingly intelligent paranoiac.

The scientific theorist is not to be envied. For Nature, or more precisely experiment, is an inexorable and not very friendly judge of his work. It never says Yes to a theory. In the most favorable cases it says Maybe, and in the great majority of cases simply No. If an experiment agrees with a theory it means for the latter Maybe, and if it does not agree it means No. Probably every theory will someday experience its No - most theories, soon after conception.

And it's frustrating because you've never been taught how to bridge the gap between theory and practice, between your New Year's resolutions and your actual behaviour.