Hypothesis Quotes

From the standpoint of observation, then, we must regard it as a highly probable hypothesis that the beginnings of the mental life date from as far back as the beginnings of life at large.

Your Highness, I have no need of this hypothesis.

The word "belief" is a difficult thing for me. I don't believe. I must have a reason for a certain hypothesis. Either I know a thing, and then I know it - I don't need to believe it.

If the facts are contrary to any predictions, then the hypothesis is wrong no matter how appealing.

The shrewd guess, the fertile hypothesis, the courageous leap to a tentative conclusion - these are the most valuable coins of the thinker at work. But in most schools guessing is heavily penalized and is associated somehow with laziness.

It would be very discouraging if somewhere down the line you could ask a computer if the Riemann hypothesis is correct and it said, 'Yes, it is true, but you won't be able to understand the proof.'

If I were to awaken after having slept for a thousand years, my first question would be: Has the Riemann hypothesis been proven?

This, it may be said, is no more than a hypothesis... only of that force of precedent which in all times has been so strong to keep alive religious forms of which the original meaning is lost.

What is required of a working hypothesis is a fine capacity for discrimination.

The hypothesis may be put forward, to be tested by the s subsequent investigation, that this development has been in large part a matter of the reciprocal interaction of new factual insights and knowledge on the one hand with changes in the theoretical system on the other.

The greatest problem for mathematicians now is probably the Riemann Hypothesis.

One must credit an hypothesis with all that has had to be discovered in order to demolish it.

I am not here concerned with intent, but with scientific standards, especially the ability to tell the difference between a fact, an opinion, a hypothesis, and a hole in the ground.

It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young.

The fact that we don't keep repeating tests in the same arena is not because the probability of the hypothesis showing its falsity in other arenas goes up after it has passed tests in one arena.

I cannot give any scientist of any age better advice than this: the intensity of a conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing over whether it is true or not.

The great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

One finds the truth by making a hypothesis and comparing observations with the hypothesis.

There's two possible outcomes: if the result confirms the hypothesis, then you've made a discovery. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you've made a discovery.

The only relevant test of the validity of a hypothesis is comparison of prediction with experience.

Probably the simplest hypothesis... is that there may be a slow process of annihilation of matter.

In order to shake a hypothesis, it is sometimes not necessary to do anything more than push it as far as it will go.

Don't confuse hypothesis and theory. The former is a possible explanation; the latter, the correct one. The establishment of theory is the very purpose of science.

Originally, in the early eighties, the drug hypothesis was among the first which occurred to scientists.

Our working hypothesis is that the status of knowledge is altered as societies enter what is known as the postindustrial age and cultures enter what is known as the postmodern age.

The hypothesis of surviving intelligence and personality - not only surviving but anxious and able with difficulty to communicate - is the simplest and most straightforward and the only one that fits all the facts.

I long ago suggested the hypothesis, that in the basin of the Thames there are indications of a meeting in the Pleistocene period of a northern and southern fauna.

Not as a demonstrated natural law, but as a working hypothesis.

Truth in science can be defined as the working hypothesis best suited to open the way to the next better one.

In choosing a hypothesis there is no virtue in being timid. I clearly would have been burned at the stake in another age.