Problem Theory Quotes & Sayings

Here the attention of the research workers is primarily directed to the problem of reconciling the claims of the special relativity theory with those of the quantum theory. The extraordinary advances made in this field by Dirac ... leave open the question whether it will be possible to satisfy the claims of the two theories without at the same time determining the Sommerfeld fine-structure constant. — Werner Heisenberg

The problem of psychoanalysis is not the body of theory that Freud left behind, but the fact that it never became a medical science. It never tried to test its ideas. — Eric Kandel

Of course, we knew that the official reports were sketchy, if not falsified. But, in terms of information theory, this is precisely where the problem lay: How were we to reconstruct reality from incomplete or false reports? It is not true that virtually all news in a totalitarian state is false. On the contrary, most news is completely correct, albeit tendentiously slanded; it is just that certain information is suppressed. One can adjust for the political slanting of the news, but there is virtually no way to fill in the omissions. — Konrad Zuse

Education, you know, means broadening, advancing; and if you limit a teacher to only one side of anything, the whole country will eventually have only one thought, be one individual. I believe in teaching every aspect of every problem or theory. — John T. Scopes

It is obvious that mathematics needs both sorts of mathematicians, theory-builders and problem-solvers. — Timothy Gowers

Bowlby uses the notion of faulty internal working models to describe different patterns of neurotic attachment. He sees the basic problem of 'anxious attachment" as that of maintaining attachment with a care-giver who is unpredictable or rejecting. Here the internal working model will be based not on accurate representation of the self and others, but on coping, in which the care-giver must be accommodated to. The two basic strategies here are those of avoidance or adherence, which lead to avoidant or ambivalent attachment. — Jeremy Holmes

Einstein wrestled with a problem back before we even knew the universe was expanding, and he was looking for a way to keep the universe from collapsing. And so he discovered, in his theory of gravity, something like this dark energy - he called it a cosmological constant - could play this role, pushing things away. — Adam Riess

String theory has had a long and wonderful history. It originated as a technique to try to understand the strong force. It was a calculational mechanism, a way of approaching a mathematical problem that was too difficult, and it was a promising way, but it was only a technique. It was a mathematical technique rather than a theory in itself. — Sheldon Lee Glashow

...a useful coorective to the triumphalism of some scientists. For example, Maddox went out of his way to emphasise the provisional nature of much physics - he referred to black holes as 'putative' only, to the search for theories of everything as 'the embodiment of a belief, even a hope' and stated that the reason why the quantum gravity project is 'becalmed' right now is because 'the problem to be solved is not yet fully understood' and that the idea that the universe began with a Big Bang 'will be found to be false'. — Peter Watson

I did my masters in elementary particles. But the foundations of elementary particles is quantum theory and there were too many conceptual problems around quantum theory that I couldn't live with. So I decided I was going to work on the foundations of quantum theory. That's what I did my Ph.D on. — Vandana Shiva

Perhaps the most extraordinary popular delusion about violence of the past quarter-century is that it is caused by low self-esteem. That theory has been endorsed by dozens of prominent experts, has inspired school programs designed to get kids to feel better about themselves, and in the late 1980s led the California legislature to form a Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem. Yet Baumeister has shown that the theory could not be more spectacularly, hilariously, achingly wrong. Violence is a problem not of too little self-esteem but of too much, particularly when it is unearned. — Steven Pinker

the process of learning a theory depends upon the study of applications, including practice problem-solving both with a pencil and paper and with instruments in the laboratory. If, for example, the student of Newtonian dynamics ever discovers the meaning of terms like 'force,' 'mass,' 'space,' and 'time,' he does so less from the incomplete though sometimes helpful definitions in his text than by observing and participating in the application of these concepts to problem-solution. That — Thomas S. Kuhn

I believe that the best way to create good living conditions for any animal, whether it's a captive animal living in a zoo, a farm animal or a pet, is to base animal welfare programs on the core emotion systems in the brain. My theory is that the environment animals live in should activate their positive emotions as much as possible, and not activate their negative emotions any more than necessary. If we get the animal's emotions rights, we will have fewer problem behaviors ... All animals and people have the same core emotion systems in the brain. — Temple Grandin

This, indeed, is the problem, the ultimate question, in neuroscience - and it cannot be answered, even in principle, without a global theory of brain function, one capable of showing the interactions of every level, from the micropatterns of individual neuronal responses to the grand macropatterns of an actual lived life. Such a theory, a neural theory of personal identity, has been proposed in the last few years by Gerald M. Edelman, in his theory of neuronal group selection, or neural Darwinism. — Oliver Sacks

Each electron wants the whole of three-dimensional space for its waves; so Schrodinger generously allows three dimensions for each of them. For two electrons he requires a six-dimensional sub-aether. He then successfully applies his method on the same lines as before. I think you will see now that Schrodinger has given us what seemed to be a comprehensible physical picture only to snatch it away again. His sub-aether does not exist in physical space; it is in a 'configuration space' imagined by the mathematician for the purpose of solving his problems, and imagined afresh with different numbers of dimensions according to the problem proposed. It was only an accident that in the earliest problems considered the configuration space had a close correspondence with physical space, suggesting some degree of objective reality of the waves. Schrodinger's wave mechanics is not a physical theory but a dodge - and a very good dodge too. — Arthur Stanley Eddington

Simply put, feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression. This was a definition of feminism I offered in Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center more than 10 years ago. It was my hope at the time that it would become a common definition everyone would use. I liked this definition because it did not imply that men were the enemy. By naming sexism as the problem it went directly to the heart of the matter. Practically, it is a definition which implies that all sexist thinking and action is the problem, whether those who perpetuate it are female or male, child or adult. It is also broad enough to include an understanding of systemic institutionalized sexism. As a definition it is open-ended. To understand feminism it implies one has to necessarily understand sexism. — Bell Hooks

[I]n so far as postmodern politics involves a '[t]heoretical retreat from the problem of domination within capitalism,' it is here, in this silent suspension of class analysis, that we are dealing with an exemplary case of the mechanism of ideological displacement: when class antagonism is disavowed, when its key structuring role is suspended, 'other markers of social difference may come to bear an inordinate weight; indeed, they may bear all the weight of the sufferings produced by capitalism in addition to that attributable to the explicitly politicized marking.' In other words, this displacement accounts for the somewhat 'excessive' way the discourse of postmodern identity politics insists on the horrors of sexism, racism, and so on - this 'excess' comes from the fact that these other '-isms' have to bear the surplus-investment from the class struggle whose extent is not acknowledged. — Slavoj Zizek

The standard cosmological theory
an expanding universe
does not really solve the problem of God. It simply makes it more problematical. Once the creator-creation model is discarded as primitive mythology, we still have not touched the ancient conundrum, ex nihilo nihil fit: nothing comes from nothing, and the "axiom" that "Nothing is unstable' rivals in scholastic absurdity anything Aquinas may have said eight hundred years ago and can only be postulated given the reality of something, whereby it becomes a self-evident and unarguable tautology. — R. Joseph Hoffmann

Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve. — Karl Popper

Shepherd Book: What are we up to, sweetheart?
River: Fixing your Bible.
Book: I, um ... What?
River: Bible's broken. Contradictions, false logistics - doesn't make sense.
Shepherd Book: No, no. You-you-you can't ...
River: So we'll integrate non-progressional evolution theory with God's creation of Eden. Eleven inherent metaphoric parallels already there. Eleven. Important number. Prime number. One goes into the house of eleven eleven times, but always comes out one. Noah's ark is a problem.
Shepherd Book: Really?
River: We'll have to call it early quantum state phenomenon. Only way to fit 5000 species of mammal on the same boat.
Shepherd Book: River, you don't fix the Bible.
River: It's broken. It doesn't make sense.
Book: It's not about making sense. It's about believing in something, and letting that belief be real enough to change your life. It's about faith. You don't fix faith, River. It fixes you. — Ben Edlund

But my point is not just that the psychological theory is inadequate; it is that the practice is unproductive. If we do not address the ultimate cause of a problem, the problem will not get solved. This is not to say — Alfie Kohn

Psychotherapy theory turns it all on you: you are the one who is wrong. If a kid is having trouble or is discouraged, the problem is not just inside the kid; it's also in the system, the society. — James Hillman

There can be theory but, you know, the problem is you've got to be able to test it. So theories are one thing, testing is another. — Brian Schmidt

Tolkien helped Lewis to realise that the problem lay not in Lewis's rational failure to understand the theory, but in his imaginative failure to grasp its significance. The issue was not primarily about truth, but about meaning. When — Alister E. McGrath

This is the problem for which revolutionary theory has yet to find the right solution, if there is one. The difficulty is that the economic interests of the two classes are antagonistic. — Garet Garrett

I spent months searching for some secret code before I realized that common sense has nothing to do with it. Hysteria, psychosis, torture, depression: I was told that if something is unpleasant it's probably feminine. This encouraged me, but the theory was blown by such masculine nouns as murder, toothache, and rollerblade. I have no problem learning the words themselves, it's the sexes that trip me up and refuse to stick. — David Sedaris

There is prepossession on either side of the controversy, the one positive, the other negative, and history itself must decide between them. The facts must rule philosophy, not philosophy the facts. If it can be made out that the life of Christ and the apostolic church can be psychologically and historically explained only by the admission of the supernatural element which they claim, while every other explanation only increases the difficulty, of the problem and substitutes an unnatural miracle for a supernatural one, the historian has gained the case, and it is for the philosopher to adjust his theory to history. The duty of the historian is not to make the facts, but to discover them, and then to construct his theory wide enough to give them all comfortable room. — Philip Schaff

The puzzle of time, the mystery of creation, the problem of evil, the enigma of knowledge, the state of soul, the vexations of probability theory of the nature of God's grace, all reduced to a single question. What does it mean, in a world of God's creation, that man is free to choose between the paths of good and evil? — Bernard Beckett

Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you (Matthew 6:33). The principle that Jesus expressed in these words is the basic law that underlies all answer to prayer. Many people know this in theory but are confused about putting it into practice. They think, "I will ignore this problem and think about God instead." Here there is a subtle mistake; because they are really thinking of their problem as existing in one place, of God as existing in another, and of themselves as going in thought from the first place to the second place. This, of course, is by implication to reaffirm the existence of the problem in its own place, and such a belief will not heal. What we have to do is to seek the Kingdom in the very place where the trouble seems to be. We have to know that in Truth and reality it is not there, because God is there. When we succeed in doing this, the difficulty disappears. — Emmet Fox

It felt like religious kitsch, as tacky as a black velvet painting, the kind of fantasy that appealed to people who ate too much fried food, spanked their kids, and had no problem with the theory that their loving God invented AIDS to punish the gays. — Tom Perrotta

One current reaction to change in families, for example, is the proposal for more "education for parenthood," on the theory that this training will not only teach specific skills such as how to change diapers or how to play responsively with toddlers, but will raise parents' self-confidence at the same time. The proposed cure, in short, is to reform and educate the people with the problem. — Kenneth Keniston

Just like she'd said, she'd gone back to her life and, in theory, I'd gone back to mine. Problem? I didn't like mine, not without her. - Noah — Katie McGarry

Because the theory of quantum mechanics could explain all of chemistry and the various properties of substances, it was a tremendous success. But still there was the problem of the interaction of light and matter. — Richard P. Feynman

The basic problem of the Christians in this country in the last eighty years or so, in regard to society and in regard to government, is that they have seen things in bits and pieces instead of totals. — Francis A. Schaeffer

We have here the fundamental problem of ethics, the crux of the theory of moral conduct. What is justice? -shall we seek righteousness, or shall we seek power? -is it better to be good, or to be strong? — Will Durant

Twenty years ago, chaos theory was all the rage. I wonder what happened with that. Maybe all the excitement over it become so organized that its initial entropy failed to fall apart and disintegrate into nothingness leaving its proponents re-illusioned in certainty. I remember seeing an employee at a local book store arranging a subsection for literature about chaos among the science books. "There's the problem." I thought. "How can there be a chaos section? Those books should be distributed randomly throughout the store... that is, if there was any real disorder to things. — Alex Bosworth

The rationale for accepting or rejecting any theory is thus fundamentally based on the idea of problem-solving progress. If one research tradition has solved more important problems than its rivals, then accepting that tradition is rational precisely to the degree that we are aiming to "progress," i.e., to maximize the scope f solved problems. In other words, the choice of one tradition over its rivals is a progressive (and thus a rational) choice precisely to the extent that the chosen tradition is a better problem solver than its rivals. — Larry Laudan

If you're now noticing a certain family resemblance among this no-successive-instant problem, Zeno's Paradoxes, and some of the Real Line crunchers described in Paragraph 2c and -e, be advised that this is not a coincidence. They are all facets of the great continuity conundrum for mathematics, which is that (Infinity)-related entities can apparently be neither handled nor eliminated. Nowhere is this more evident than with 1/(Infinity)s. They're riddled with paradox and can't be defined, but if you banish them from math you end up having to posit an infinite density to any interval, in which the idea of succession makes no sense and no ordering of points in the interval can ever be complete, since between any two points there will be not just some other points but a whole infinity of them.
Overall point: However good calculus is at quantifying motion and change, it can do nothing to solve the real paradoxes of continuity. Not without a coherent theory of (Infinity), anyway. — David Foster Wallace

Great mathematics is achieved by solving difficult problems not by fabricating elaborate theories in search of a problem. — Harold Davenport

The problem of political theory is how to combine that degree of individual initiative which is necessary for progress, with the degree of social cohesion which is necessary for survival. — Bertrand Russell

I believe that my theory is correct; for whatever be the question upon which I am arguing, whether it be religious, philosophical, political, or economical; whether it affects well-being, morality, equality, right, justice, progress, responsibility, property, labor, exchange, capital, wages, taxes, population, credit, or Government; at whatever point of the scientific horizon I start from, I invariably come to the same thing - the solution of the social problem is in liberty. — Frederic Bastiat

The isolated imagination is easily corrupted by theory, but the writer inside his community seldom has such a problem. — Flannery O'Connor

I find some small, twisted comfort in thinking that perhaps we used each other. Him, for a glimpse into what it would be like to live a life entirely different from the one he'd been raised to desire, and me for the steady diet of angst and emotional damage that seemed to make me better, sharper, like a sword against a whetstone.
I was his intellectual escape from a long parade of pretty, empty girls... and he was my drug of choice -- unhealthy, probably lethal, but ultimately so addictive it was hard to turn away.
The problem, of course, with this theory of mutual exploitation, is that it is the deepest of lies. There was nothing equal or mutual about the way we used each other. I barely scratched his surface while he sliced me limb from limb.
There's no comfort in that. None at all. — Julie Johnson

Law students are famous for busting their buns to make high grades, sometimes at the expense of health and relationships, thinking, 'Later I'll be happy, because the American dream will be mine,' " said Lawrence S. Krieger, a law professor at Florida State University and an author of the study. "Nice, except it doesn't work." The problem with the more prestigious jobs, said Mr. Krieger, is that they do not provide feelings of competence, autonomy or connection to others - three pillars of self-determination theory, the psychological model of human happiness on which the study was based. Public-service jobs do. — Anonymous

Evolution is no longer just a theory; it has been proven true beyond a reasonable doubt. The problem is, even people who believe evolution is true disassociate themselves from the process. They somehow skipped all the lower forms of animal life and just started out at the top of the evolutionary ladder.

The evidence says we evolved as life evolved.

Human beings did not just appear at the top of the evolutionary ladder to reap the benefits of those millions of years of evolution without having to live through it.

In other words, you were those other animals. Someone had to be them.

You had to be lower animals to be a human now. You lived as all the different animals in your evolutionary line. You lived through millions of years, and millions of lives and deaths to get to where you are now. That's what Darwin's book means. — Michael Smith

Americans are coming to their senses, and the libertarian theory of society and government is pointing the way. The times change, but the enduring principles that help us to interpret and understand the world do not. It remains true now, as then, as in the future, saecula saeculorum, that government provides neither an effective nor a moral means for solving any human problem. — Llewellyn Rockwell

So where does the name Adam's apple come from? Most people say that it is from the notion that this bump was caused by the forbidden fruit getting stuck in the throat of Adam in the Garden of Eden. There is a problem with this theory because some Hebrew scholars believe that the forbidden fruit was the pomegranate. The Koran claims that the forbidden fruit was a banana. So take your pick
Adam's apple, Adam's pomegranate, Adam's banana. Eve clearly chewed before swallowing. — Mark Leyner

The question of the acceptance of theories should, I propose, be demoted to the status of a minor problem. For science may be regarded as a growing system of problems, rather than as a system of beliefs. And for a system of problems, the tentative acceptance of a theory or a conjecture means hardly more than that it is considered worthy of further criticism. — Karl R. Popper

The problem with feature filmmaking is that it offers you this mirage of being able to achieve perfection, as the theory of it is that you have control of every part of the film, though in reality, it is as inexact as the next thing in your life. — Kapil Sharma

Such work would never be done if scientists were satisfied with a lazy default such as 'intelligent design theory' would encourage. Here is the message that an imaginary 'intelligent design theorist' might broadcast to scientists: 'If you don't understand how something works, never mind: just give up and say God did it. You don't know how the nerve impulse works? Good! You don't understand how memories are laid down in the brain? Excellent! Is photosynthesis a bafflingly complex process? Wonderful! Please don't go to work on the problem, just give up, and appeal to God. Dear scientist, don't work on your mysteries. Bring us your — Richard Dawkins

The quantum theory of parallel universes is not the problem, it is the solution. It is not some troublesome, optional interpretation emerging from arcane theoretical considerations. It is the explanation, the only one that is tenable, of a remarkable and counter-intuitive reality. — David Deutsch

At the other end of the spectrum is, for example, graph theory, where the basic object, a graph, can be immediately comprehended. One will not get anywhere in graph theory by sitting in an armchair and trying to understand graphs better. Neither is it particularly necessary to read much of the literature before tackling a problem: it is of course helpful to be aware of some of the most important techniques, but the interesting problems tend to be open precisely because the established techniques cannot easily be applied. — Timothy Gowers

The problem of physics is how the actual phenomena, as observed with the help of our sense organs aided by instruments, can be reduced to simple notions which are suited for precise measurement and used of the formulation of quantitative laws.
Experiment and Theory in Physics — Max Born

We have such a theory now; we can solve any moral problem, on any level. Self-interest, love of family, duty to country, responsibility toward the human race - we are even developing an exact ethic for extra-human relations. But all moral problems can be illustrated by one misquotation: 'Greater love hath no man than a mother cat dying to defend her kittens.' Once you understand the problem facing that cat and how she solved it, you will then be ready to examine yourself and learn how high up the moral ladder you are capable of climbing. — Robert A. Heinlein

From the point of view of the pure morphologist the recapitulation theory is an instrument of research enabling him to reconstruct probable lines of descent; from the standpoint of the student of development and heredity the fact of recapitulation is a difficult problem whose solution would perhaps give the key to a true understanding of the real nature of heredity. — E.S. Russell

Game theory, however, deals only with the way in which ultrasmart, all knowing people should behave in competitive situations, and has little to say to Mr. X as he confronts the morass of his problem. — Howard Raiffa

Psychotherapy makes every problem a subjective, inner problem. And that's not where the problems come from. They come from the environment, the cities, the economy, the racism. They come from architecture, school systems, capitalism, exploitation. They come from many places that psychotherapy does not address. Psychotherapy theory turns it all on you: you are the one who is wrong. — James Hillman

It's not an academic question any more to ask what's going to happen to a cloud. People very much want to know - and that means there's money available for it. That problem is very much within the realm of physics and it's a problem very much of the same caliber. You're looking at something complicated, and the present way of solving it is to try to look at as many points as you can, enough stuff to say where the cloud is, where the warm air is, what its velocity is, and so forth. Then you stick it into the biggest machine you can afford and you try to get an estimate of what it's going to do next. But this is not very realistic. — James Gleick

Get back to work, he would tell himself sternly. There's a garuda to get airborne. — China Mieville

For [Wolfgang] Pauli the central problem of electrodynamics was the field concept and the existence of an elementary charge which is expressible by the fine-structure constant ... 1/137. This fundamental pure number had greatly fascinated Pauli, .... For Pauli the explanation of the number 137 was the test of a successful field theory, a test which no theory has passed up to now. — Charles P. Enz

An old French mathematician said: A mathematical theory is not to be considered complete until you have made it so clear that you can explain it to the first man whom you meet on the street. This clearness and ease of comprehension, here insisted on for a mathematical theory, I should still more demand for a mathematical problem if it is to be perfect; for what is clear and easily comprehended attracts, the complicated repels us. — David Hilbert

Consider the problem, "How can I win the game of tick-tack-toe?" It is well known that I cannot, if I assume (in keeping with the conventions of game theory) that my opponent understands the game perfectly. Put another way, there is no "technical solution" to the problem. I can win only by giving a radical meaning to the word "win." I can hit my opponent over the head; or I can drug him; or I can falsify the records. Every way in which I "win" involves, in some sense, an abandonment of the game, as we intuitively understand it. (I can also, of course, openly abandon the game--refuse to play it. This is what most adults do.) — Garrett Hardin

It is obvious that the most despotic forms of social organization would be suitable for inert men who are satisfied with the situation fate has placed them in, and that the most abstract form of democratic theory would be practicable among sages guided only by their reason. The only problem is to what degree it is possible to excite or to contain the passions without endangering public happiness. — Madame De Stael

Nevertheless statesmen are still greatly exercised by the problem of the international distribution of money. For hundreds of years, the Midas Theory, systematized by Mercantilism, has been the rule followed by governments in taking measures of commercial policy. In spite of Hume, Smith, and Ricardo, it still dominates men's minds more than would be expected. Phoenix-like, it rises again and again from its own ashes. — Ludwig Von Mises

The problem Creationists identify is with the word 'theory', not with the case for evolution — Lance Parkin

The whole [scientific] process resembles biological evolution. A problem is like an ecological niche, and a theory is like a gene or a species which is being tested for viability in that niche. — David Deutsch

The problem is that our ideas are sticky: once we produce a theory, we are not likely to change our minds ... — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

What are the differences between computer and humanity??
If computer get hot, there is a fan for the computer. If a man get hot, which will mean to much information in head, the humanity start to masturbate!
But the question is why computer have one fan and humanity have two hands??
It's simple as that!
Fan can be replaced, but one hand can't be replaced if it's broken, so it's gave one more if you have problem with the one to use the other. Take it as a gift! — Deyth Banger

The problem is that replacement of Quantum Mechanics by Quantum Field Theory is still very demanding. — Martin Fleischmann

Thus we come to the problem of determining what the poem is 'about.' Charles Altieri notes that '[a]n expression of the self can be one that is intended, the self's act, or one that is symptomatic, the act of a self not in control of what it manifests'(24) In 'Yankee Doodle,' and to a lesser extent in '$$$$$$," the interesting aspects of the poem are not 'the intended expression of the self.' The lack of explicitness is not suggestive in any positive sense because we feel that were things to be spelled out, this would weaken, not strengthen, the narrator's case by revealing the unacknowledged irrationality at the root of it. — Russell Harrison

During all those years of experimentation and research, I never once made a discovery. All my work was deductive, and the results I achieved were those of invention, pure and simple. I would construct a theory and work on its lines until I found it was untenable. Then it would be discarded at once and another theory evolved. This was the only possible way for me to work out the problem. — Thomas A. Edison

In the ensuing chapters, we will look in some detail at particular manifestations of the modern scientific ideology and the false paths down which it has led us. We will consider how biological determinism has been used to explain and justify inequalities within and between societies and to claim that those inequalities can never be changed. We will see how a theory of human nature has been developed using Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection to claim that social organization is also unchangeable because it is natural. We will see how problems of health and disease have been located within the individual so that the individual becomes a problem for society to cope with rather than society becoming a problem for the individual. And we will see how simple economic relationships masquerading as facts of nature can drive the entire direction of biological research and technology. — Richard C. Lewontin

The theory of numbers is particularly liable to the accusation that some of its problems are the wrong sort of questions to ask. I do not myself think the danger is serious; either a reasonable amount of concentration leads to new ideas or methods of obvious interest, or else one just leaves the problem alone. "Perfect numbers" certainly never did any good, but then they never did any particular harm. — John Edensor Littlewood

Most economists would concede that, in theory, government has the tools to smooth the business cycle. The problem is that fiscal policy is not made in theory; it's made in Congress. — Charles Wheelan

The meaning of a story should go on expanding for the reader the more he thinks about it, but meaning cannot be captured in an interpretation. If teachers are in the habit of approaching a story as if it were a research problem for which any answer is believable so long as it is not obvious, then I think students will never learn to enjoy fiction. Too much interpretation is certainly worse than too little, and where feeling for a story is absent, theory will not supply it. — Flannery O'Connor

The ordinary operations of algebra suffice to resolve problems in the theory of curves. — Joseph-Louis Lagrange

Evolution has long been badly taught. In particular, students - and even professional biologists - acquire theories of evolution without any deep understanding of what problem these theories attempt to solve. They learn but little of the evolution of evolutionary theory. — Gregory Bateson

A witch is a causal theory of explanation. And it's fair to say that if your causal theory to explain why bad things happen is that your neighbor flies around on a broom and cavorts with the devil at night, inflicting people, crops, and cattle with disease, preventing cows from giving milk, beer from fermenting, and butter from churning - and that the proper way to cure the problem is to burn her at the stake - then either you are insane or you lived in Europe six centuries ago, and you even had biblical support, specifically Exodus 22:18: Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. — Michael Shermer

Yet, emotionally I could not bring myself to accept either his presence, or his reality. My problem was not a religious problem. God could certainly create as many variations of intelligent humans as he wanted. Presumably God put humans here on this earth, and all non-humans on some other far-away planet orbiting some other far-away star. My problem was a scientific problem. For the Tall White guard to be standing there in the hot sun, for real, would mean that everything I had been taught about Einstein and the Theory of Relativity was simply incorrect. — Charles James Hall

The problem with intelligent-design theory, is not that it is false but that it is not falsifiable. Not being susceptible to contradicting evidence, it is not a testable hypothesis. Hence it is not a scientific but a creedal tenet - a matter of faith, unsuited to a public school's science curriculum. — George Will

It seems, in theory, that I should be able to control at least a few of my bad habits. The problem is that my habits make me depressed, and the depression makes me want to indulge my habits and so I do. There isn't any solution to this. — John S. Hall

No conceptually regimented and normatively informed theory of mental disorder can be devised without taking philosophy of mind seriously and knowing something about this subject area of philosophy and of such topics as consciousness, Intentionality, personal identity, the mind/body problem and rationality. — George Graham

We don't see very far in the future, we are very focused on one idea at a time, one problem at a time, and all these are incompatible with rationality as economic theory assumes it. — Daniel Kahneman

...the essential task of feminism is not to go looking around for a ready-made theory and then try to make it relevant to our (little?) "issue" or "problem". This is self-depreciating in the extreme, a fact that is obvious if one realises that feminism is cosmic in its dimensions. — Mary Daly

Consider the enormity of the problem. Science has proved that the universe exploded into being at a certain moment. It asks: What cause produced this effect? Who or what put the matter or energy into the universe? And science cannot answer these questions, because, according to the astronomers, in the first moments of its existence the Universe was compressed to an extraordinary degree, and consumed by the heat of a fire beyond human imagination. The shock of that instant must have destroyed every particle of evidence that could have yielded a clue to the cause of the great explosion. — Robert Jastrow

... theory is good for you because studying it expands your mind... Specific technical knowledge, though useful today, becomes outdated in just a few years. Consider instead the abilities to think, to express yourself clearly and precisely, to solve problems, and to know when you haven't solved a problem. These abilities have lasting value. Studying theory trains you in these areas. — Michael Sipser

I think the problem in the Republican Party is really not money. I think they've got lots of it. I think it is theory of the case - why are we here, what is our message, how to connect to the real world. — Bob Woodward

Here's what I think I'm having trouble with: this is what happiness is. When I was a kid, I thought I'd just get happier and happier as I got older, and have more things to be happy about. I based this theory on observation of select adults. The problem with my results is that I couldn't tell the difference then between happy and fake-happy. Now I know you pretend to be just frigging ecstatic over everything, maybe because you're so glad it's not worse. — Emma Bull

It will be seen how subjectivism and objectivism, spiritualism and materialism, activity and suffering, only lose their antithetical character, and thus their existence, as such antitheses in the social condition; it will be seen how the resolution of the theoretical antitheses is only possible in a practical way, by virtue of the practical energy of men. Their resolution is therefore by no means merely a problem of knowledge, but a real problem of life, which philosophy could not solve precisely because it conceived this problem as merely a theoretical one. — Robert C. Tucker

The instinct to survive is human nature itself, and every aspect of our personalities derives from it. Anything that conflicts with the survival instinct acts sooner or later to eliminate the individual and thereby fails to show up in future generations ... A scientifically verifiable theory of morals must be rooted in the individual's instinct to survive
and nowhere else!
and must correctly describe the hierarchy of survival, note the motivations at each level, and resolve all conflicts.
We have such a theory now; we can solve any moral problem, on any level. Self-interest, love of family, duty to country, responsibility toward the human race ...
The basis of all morality is duty, a concept with the same relation to group that self-interest has to individual. — Robert A. Heinlein

Many years ago I developed a theory of mutual exclusivity. I had observed in my own life that either God solved a problem or I solved the problem but both God and I did not work on the same problem at the same time. If I decided to solve it then God had better things to do than to help me. If I decided to turn the problem over to God then God would resolve the issue. When I refer to my solving the problem, I am referring to taking wilful action and deciding what the correct resolution is. If my family needs food, go out and work to earn money and feed them. There is a great difference between detachment and doing nothing. — Heather Cardin

It turns out to be very difficult to devise a theory to describe the universe all in one go. Instead, we break the problem up into bits and invent a number of partial theories. Each of these partial theories describes and predicts a certain limited class of observations, neglecting the effects of other quantities, or representing them by simple sets of numbers. It may be that this approach is completely wrong. If everything in the universe depends on everything else in a fundamental way, it might be impossible to get close to a full solution by investigating parts of the problem in isolation. Nevertheless, it is certainly the way that we have made progress in the past. — Stephen Hawking

In sum: banking theory and practice, as immobilizing and fixating forces, fail to acknowledge men and women as historical beings; problem-posing theory and practice take the people's historicity as their starting point. — Paulo Freire

The situation today is, we haven't got a good model to explain partial reflection by two surfaces; we just calculate the probability that a particular photomultiplier will be hit by a photon reflected from a sheet of glass. I have chosen this calculation as our first example of the method provided by theory of quantum electrodynamics. I am going to show you "how we count the beans"-what the physicists do to get the right answer. I am not going to explain how the photons actually "decide" whether to bounce back or go through; that is not known. (Probably the question has no meaning.) I will only show you how to calculate the correct probability that light will be reflected from glass of a given thickness, because that's the only thing physicists know how to do! What we do to get the answer to this problem is analogous to the things we have to do to get the answer to every other problem explained by quantum electrodynamics. — Richard Feynman

Stalin had developed an interesting new theory: that resistance to socialism increases as its successes mount, because its foes resist with greater desperation as they contemplate their final defeat. Thus any problem in the Soviet Union could be defined as an example of enemy action, and enemy action could be defined as evidence of progress.
P. 41 — Timothy Snyder

A third reason scientists are reluctant to examine paranormal phenomena is that they appear to contradict known physical laws. What is the point of studying the impossible? Only a fool would waste his time. The problem of data in conflict with existing theory cannot be overstated. Arthur Eddington once said you should never believe any experiment until it has been confirmed by theory, but this humorous view has a reality that cannot be discounted. — Michael Crichton

The problem of the origin of the laws of physics is an acute one for physicists. Einstein's suggestion that they may turn out necessarily to possess the form that they do has little support. It is sometimes said that a truly unified theory of physics might be so tightly constrained logically that its mathematical formulation is unique. But this claim is readily refuted. It is easy to construct artificial universe models, albeit impoverished ones bearing only a superficial resemblance to the real thing, which are nevertheless mathematically and logically self-consistent. — Paul Davies

The problem is that string theory is defined at an energy scale that is about ten million billion times larger than those we can experimentally explore with our current instruments. — Lisa Randall

One readon why it has taken so long to construct a quantum theory of gravity is that all previous quantum theories were background dependent. It proved rather challenging to construct a background independent quantum theory, in which the mathematical structure of the quantum theory made no mention of points, except when identified through networks of relationships. The problem of how to construct a quantum theoretic description of a world in which space and time are nothing but networks of relationships was solved over the last 15 years of the twentieth century. The theory that resulted is loop quantum gravity, which is one of our three roads. — Lee Smolin

The core of the doctrine consists in the proposition that the supply of money and the demand for it both affect its value. This proposition is probably a sufficiently good hypothesis to explain big changes in prices; but it is far from containing a complete theory of the value of money. It describes one cause of changes in prices; it is nevertheless inadequate for dealing with the problem exhaustively. By itself it does not comprise a theory of the value of money; it needs the basis of a general value theory. One after another, the doctrine of supply and demand, the cost-of-production theory, and the subjective theory of value have had to provide the foundations for the Quantity Theory. — Ludwig Von Mises