I have a theory that evolutionary biologists are more vain than particle physicists.
Religion is not theory – it is life. It is not intellectual conviction – it is divine humanity, and nothing else.
A theory of creativity is actually just a metaphor. A pool of ideas, a well of memories, a voice.
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.
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?
My theory is that everything an actor does, from the way he looks at his watch to the way he moves across the stage, is in the service of advancing a story, and in that sense, it’s all writing. In that sense we, while acting, write.
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.
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.
My first ambition in life, I made up my mind I was going to become Miles Davis. I studied music, music theory. I played trumpet for nine years. One day, my mother explained, ‘You can’t be Miles Davis. There’s one, and he’s got that job.’
The idea that women were oppressed throughout history is an appalling theory.
Early-twentieth-century abstraction is art’s version of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. It’s the idea that changed everything everywhere: quickly, decisively, for good.
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.
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.
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.
The nature of catastrophe is, after all, reasonably unvarying in the way it ruins, destroys, wounds and devastates. But if something can be learned from the event – not least something as profound as the theory of plate tectonics – then it somehow puts the ruination into a much more positive light.
I tend to gravitate toward conflicted characters, and a character who is exploring chaos theory and population control and the difficulties of love and family is pretty rich.
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.
Why has not anyone seen that fossils alone gave birth to a theory about the formation of the earth, that without them, no one would have ever dreamed that there were successive epochs in the formation of the globe.
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?
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.
The ‘science’ for which the United States is respected has nothing to do with the unscientific and baseless theory of evolution.
Science doesn’t work by voting. Did people vote on the theory of relativity? No! It’s either right or it’s wrong. Do we vote on whether genetics is a good theory or not? Of course not.
I started out working on supersymmetry. The theory predicts that for every particle we know about, there will be an additional particle.
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!
There is the theory… that you live in two places: You either live in fear, or you live in love.
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.
My theory in anything you do is to keep exploring, keep digging deeper to find new stuff.
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.
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.
I cannot help fearing that men may reach a point where they look on every new theory as a danger, every innovation as a toilsome trouble, every social advance as a first step toward revolution, and that they may absolutely refuse to move at all.
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.
I got expelled from high school, and then did my exams from home. I decided, through that experience, that I was going to expediate my plan and didn’t go to university. Instead, I went to a community college and studied the theory and history of film with the idea that I wanted to write and direct.
When I was at primary school, we had this theory that if you ate an egg, it meant you’d get pregnant and give birth to a chicken or another egg. It was something we dared together. I avoided eggs for years, but now they’re my favourite food.
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.
Science has authority, not because of white coats, or titles, but because of precision and transparency: you explain your theory, set out your evidence, and reference the studies that support your case.
When I was in college, I was a semiotics major, which is this hopelessly pretentious body of French literary theory.
My theory of evolution is that Darwin was adopted.
For decades, my research was driven by outstanding problems in macroeconomics: mainly growth theory and employment theory.
Commodity exchanges have a lot of advantages. One, you are helping transparency. Two, they are not political. It’s institutional building. It can survive any environment, in theory.
If the Confederacy fails, there should be written on its tombstone: Died of a Theory.
We don’t regard any scientific theory as the absolute truth.
My ‘Big Bang Theory’ costar Johnny Galecki went off the grid. He bought a huge ranch and goes there every weekend. He keeps telling me to do the same thing, but I don’t know if I’m that committed. The Valley is as far off the grid as I’m going to go.
To put it bluntly, there isn’t one economic theory that can single-handedly explain Singapore’s success; its economy combines extreme features of capitalism and socialism. All theories are partial; reality is complex.
I should point out, however, that at first some difficulty was experienced in observing the phenomena predicted by the theory, owing to the extreme smallness of the variations in the period of oscillation.
It was very useful to learn the history, the theory, and the art of building from a practical background.
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 full name of string theory is really superstring theory. The ‘super’ stands for this feature called supersymmetry, which, without getting into any details, predicts that for every known particle in the world, there should be a partner particle, the so-called supersymmetric partner.
I’m not that well-versed in literary theory – I don’t know what it is.
I write music that sounds complex but isn’t. I frankly never think in terms of theory.
The most important single thing about string theory is that it’s a highly mathematical theory, and the mathematics holds together in a very tight and consistent way. It contains in its basic structure both quantum mechanics and the theory of gravity. That’s big news.
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.
When I was at Berkeley, the framework of quantum field theory could calculate the dynamics of electromagnetism. It could roughly describe the motion of the weak nuclear force, radiation. But it hit a brick wall with the strong interaction, the binding force.
