The most superior of scientific goals is to embrace a maximum of experiment with a minimum of hypotheses.
For it is the duty of an astronomer to compose the history of the celestial motions or hypotheses about them. Since he cannot in any certain way attain to the true causes, he will adopt whatever suppositions enable the motions to be computed correctly from the principles of geometry for the future as well as for the past.
It must be conceded that a theory has an important advantage if its basic concepts and fundamental hypotheses are 'close to experience,' and greater confidence in such a theory is certainly justified. There is less danger of going completely astray, particularly since it takes so much less time and effort to disprove such theories by experience. Yet more and more, as the depth of our knowledge increases, we must give up this advantage in our quest for logical simplicity in the foundations of physical theory.
What doubts, what hypotheses, what labyrinths of amusement, what fields of disputation, what an ocean of false learning, may be avoided by that single notion of immaterialism!
How can you communicate your thoughts or demonstrate your hypotheses by conventional means when all the values and standards that you want to challenge are built into those means? Science and new technology today like to declare that they encourage 'lateral thinking,' new ways of seeing and putting data together - but all systems have an inbuilt resistance to what has not been programmed into them through the premises on which their rules are based.
Certainly it is permitted to anyone to put forward whatever hypotheses he wishes, and to develop the logical consequences contained in those hypotheses. But in order that this work merit the name of Geometry, it is necessary that these hypotheses or postulates express the result of the more simple and elementary observations of physical figures.
Hypotheses are nets: only he who casts will catch.
. . . great difficulties are felt at first and these cannot be overcome except by starting from experiments. . and then be conceiving certain hypotheses. . . But even so, very much hard work remains to be done and one needs not only great perspicacity but often a degree of good fortune.
Hypotheses are what we lack the least.
Reality may avoid the obligation to be interesting, but. . . hypotheses may not.
Hypotheses are lullabies for teachers to sing their students to sleep.
I am myself an empiric in natural philosophy, suffering my faith to go no further than my facts. I am pleased, however, to see the efforts of hypothetical speculation, because by the collisions of different hypotheses, truth may be elicited and science advanced in the end.
The role of science is to be systematic, to be accurate, to be orderly, but it certainly is not to imply that the aggregated, successful hypotheses of the past have the kind of truth that goes into a number system.
Research is so unpredictable. There are periods when nothing works and all your experiments are a disaster and all your hypotheses are wrong.
The physicist can never subject an isolated hypothesis to experimental test, but only a whole group of hypotheses.
The novel is a territory where one does not make assertions; it is a territory of play and of hypotheses.
To be fertile in hypotheses is the first perquisite of creativity and to be willing to throw them away the moment experience contradicts them is the next.
I bomb atomically, Socrates' philosophies and hypotheses Can't define how I be dropping these mockeries. Lyrically perform armed robbery, Flee with the lottery, possibly they spotted me.
Better our hypotheses die for our errors than ourselves.
Hypotheses non fingo. I frame no hypotheses.
