Theoretical Assumptions Quotes

A lot of my theories were not applicable as a closer

Why should we, however, in economics, have to plead ignorance of the sort of facts on which, in the case of a physical theory, a scientist would certainly be expected to give precise information?

Those who assume hypotheses as first principles of their speculations.....may indeed form an ingenious romance, but a romance it will still be.

The treatment of the indeterminacy principle as absolute and final can then be criticized as constituting an arbitrary restriction on scientific theories, since it does not follow from the quantum theory as such, but rather from the assumption of the unlimited validity of certain of its features, an assumption that can in no way ever be subjected to experimental proof.

We have to learn again that science without contact with experiments is an enterprise which is likely to go completely astray into imaginary conjecture.

Today we say that the law of relativity is supposed to be true at all energies, but someday somebody may come along and say how stupid we were.

It is ironic that Einsteins most creative work, the general theory of relativity, should boil down to conceptualizing space as a medium when his original premise [in special relativity] was that no such medium existed[..].

The material which a scientist actually has at his disposal, his laws, his experimental results, his mathematical techniques, his epistemological prejudices, his attitude towards the absurd consequences of the theories which he accepts, is indeterminate in many ways, ambiguous, and never fully separated from the historical background . This material is always contaminated by principles which he does not know and which, if known, would be extremely hard to test.

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.