Event quotes

From Motley Bytes Wiki
Jump to: navigation, search

George_E_P_Box

Slow Progress

“History shows that the human animal has always learned but progress used to be very slow. This was because learning often depended on the chance coming together of a potentially informative event on the one hand and a perceptive observer on the other. Scientific method accelerated that process.”
  • Source: George E.P. Box, in the article ‘Total Quality: Its Origins and its Future’, published 1995 at the Center for Quality and Productivity Improvement.

Robert_Boyle

Good Hypothesis

“The Requisites of a good Hypothesis are:
: That It be Intelligible.
: That It neither Assume nor Suppose anything Impossible, unintelligible, or demonstrably False.
: That It be consistent with Itself.
: That It be lit and sufficient to Explicate the Phaenomena, especially the chief.
: That It be, at least, consistent, with the rest of the Phaenomena It particularly relates to, and do not contradict any other known Phaenomena of nature, or manifest Physical Truth.
 
The Qualities and Conditions of an Excellent Hypothesis are:
: That It be not Precarious, but have sufficient Grounds In the nature of the Thing Itself or at least be well recommended by some Auxiliary Proofs.
: That It be the Simplest of all the good ones we are able to frame, at least containing nothing that is superfluous or Impertinent.
: That It be the only Hypothesis that can Explicate the Phaenomena; or at least, that do's Explicate them so well.
: That it enable a skillful naturalist to foretell future Phaenomena by the Congruity or Incongruity to it; and especially the event of such experiments as are aptly devised to examine It, as Things that ought, or ought not, to be consequent to It.”
  • Source: Robert Boyle, Boyle Papers, 37. Quoted In Barbara Kaplan (ed.), Divulging of Useful Truths in Physick: The Medical Agenda of Robert Boyle (1993), 50.

Mihaly_Csikszentmihalyi

Daydreaming

“One of the simplest ways to use the mind is daydreaming: playing out some sequence of events as mental images. But even this apparently easy way to order thought is beyond the range of many people... Daydreaming not only helps create emotional order by compensating in imagination for unpleasant reality — as when a person can reduce frustration and aggression against someone who has caused injury by visualizing a situation in which the aggressor is punished — but it also allows children and adults to rehearse imaginary situations so that the best strategy for confronting them may be adopted, alternative options considered, unanticipated consequences discovered — all results that help increase the complexity of consciousness. And, of course, when used with skill, daydreaming can be very enjoyable.”
  • Source: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in the book “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience“, chapter “The Flow of Thought”, page 120. Original content published by Harper Perennial Modern Classics in 1990. Kindle edition published by Harper Collins in 2008. ISBN: 978-0061876721.

Writing

“It is never a waste to write for intrinsic reasons. First of all, writing gives the mind a disciplined means of expression. It allows one to record events and experiences so that they can be easily recalled, and relived in the future. It is a way to analyze and understand experiences, a self-communication that brings order to them.”
  • Source: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in the book “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience“, chapter “The Play of Words”, page 131. Original content published by Harper Perennial Modern Classics in 1990. Kindle edition published by Harper Collins in 2008. ISBN: 978-0061876721.

David_John_Hand

Improbable Events

“Extremely improbable events are commonplace.”

Stephen_Hawking

Indefinite Past

“In classical physics, the past is assumed to exist as a definite series of events, but according to quantum physics, the past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities. Even the universe as a whole has no single past or history.”
  • Source: Hawking & Mlodinow, Scientific American, October 2010.

Werner_Heisenberg

Observations

“If we want to describe what happens in an atomic event, we have to realize that the word ‘happens’ can only apply to the observation, not to the state of affairs between two observations.”
  • Source: Heisenberg, W.(1958) Physics and Philosophy, chap. 3.

Edwin_Hubble

Scientific Judgments

“Science deals with judgments on which it is possible to obtain universal agreement. These judgments do not concern individual facts and events, but the invariable association of facts and events known as the laws of science. Agreement is secured by observation and experiment — impartial courts of appeal to which all men must submit if they wish to survive. The laws are grouped and explained by theories of ever increasing generality. The theories at first are ex post facto — merely plausible interpretations of existing bodies of data. However, they frequently lead to predictions that can be tested by experiments and observations in new fields, and, if the interpretations are verified, the theories are accepted as working hypotheses until they prove untenable. The essential requirements are agreement on the subject matter and the verification of predictions. These features insure a body of positive knowledge that can be transmitted from person to person, and that accumulates from generation to generation.”
  • Source: Edwin Powell Hubble. From manuscript on English Science in the Renaissance (1937), Edwin Hubble collection, Box 2, Huntington Library, San Marino, California. As cited by Norriss S. Hetherington in 'Philosophical Values and Observation in Edwin Hubble's Choice of a Model of the Universe', Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences (1982), 13, No. 1, 41. (Hetherington comments parenthetically that the references to court, judgment and appeal may be attributable to his prior experiences as a Rhodes Scholar reading Roman law at Oxford, and to a year's practice as an attorney in Louisville, Kentucky.)

William_James

True Ideas

“True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. False ideas are those that we can not. That is the practical difference it makes to us to have true ideas; that, therefore, is the meaning of truth, for it is all that truth is known-as. This thesis is what I have to defend. The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it. Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its verifying itself, its verification. Its validity is the process of its validation.”
  • Source: William James. From the book “Pragmatism: New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking”. Lecture VI. Published in 1907 by <Longman's, Green and Co.>, New York, NY.

Keywords: True_quotes Assimilate_quotes Corroborate_quotes Verify_quotes False_quotes Idea_quotes Practical_quotes Difference_quotes Meaning_quotes Truth_quotes Known_quotes Thesis_quotes Defend_quotes Stagnant_quotes Property_quotes Inherent_quotes Happen_quotes Become_quotes Make_quotes Event_quotes Verity_quotes Fact_quotes Process_quotes Validate_quotes

Carl_Jung

Synchronicity

“[Synchronicity is] the simultaneous occurrence of a certain psychic state with one or more external events which appear as meaningful parallels to the momentary subjective state.”
  • Source: Written by Carl Jung in the book “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle”. Published in London, UK by Routledge. Published 1985. Page 36.

Bernardo_Kastrup

Global Alignment

“It is impossible for physicists to identify global alignments... For although physicists can test individual events in the laboratory and verify that, when taken in isolation, the events are random, they wouldn’t be able to discern a global pattern within the complexity of the physical world at large; there are just too many ‘dice’ to keep track of under controlled laboratory conditions.”
  • Source: From “Decoding Jung's Metaphysics: The Archetypal Semantics of an Experiential Universe”. Written by Bernardo Kastrup. Published by IFF Books, Washington DC. Kindle Edition. Page 52. Chapter 4.

Irreducible Patterns

“If there are such irreducible macroscopic patterns, they — unlike cause and effect — may not entail relationships of strict necessity, but tendencies, affinities or dispositions instead... We cannot expect to pin down the corresponding events on the basis of empirical regularities and counterfactual dependences. Not only may these events not be consistently repeatable, the global patterns they reflect may be excluded from experiments by our very efforts to isolate the experimental setup and control its conditions. We cannot induce these acausal events at will. The best we can do is to pay attention to the world around us, in the hope of noticing one of them as it spontaneously unfolds... Next to causality, the physical world organizes itself along archetypal correspondences of meaning, which break down the barrier between world and psyche.”
  • Source: From “Decoding Jung's Metaphysics: The Archetypal Semantics of an Experiential Universe”. Written by Bernardo Kastrup. Published by IFF Books, Washington DC. Kindle Edition. Page 53. Chapter 4.

Meaningful Coincidence

“Although I do believe that many — even most — experiences of meaningful coincidence are illusory, being mediated by relatively prosaic psychological mechanisms, my own experiences make it very difficult for me to dismiss Jung’s case. In the course of my life, the archetypal meaning occasionally evoked by events in the world around me — in precise alignment with my own inner state, or that of someone close to me — has been just too compelling to attribute to chance or cognitive bias.”
  • Source: From “Decoding Jung's Metaphysics: The Archetypal Semantics of an Experiential Universe”. Written by Bernardo Kastrup. Published by IFF Books, Washington DC. Kindle Edition. Page 55-56. Chapter 4.

Metaphysically Real

“Synchronicity — insofar as it defines the structures or tendencies underlying all quantum events — is the only metaphysically real ordering principle in nature. The laws of nature we are familiar with in our daily lives become mere epiphenomena of archetypal synchronicities.”
  • Source: From “Decoding Jung's Metaphysics: The Archetypal Semantics of an Experiential Universe”. Written by Bernardo Kastrup. Published by IFF Books, Washington DC. Kindle Edition. Page 69. Chapter 4.

Cosmic Mind

“He [Jung] is extrapolating the natural basis for cognitive associations in the psyche to a universal basis for the organization of all events in nature. He seems to regard the whole universe as a supraordinate cosmic mind — a ‘greater and more comprehensive consciousness’ — operating on the principle of association by similarity, just as the human psyche does.”
  • Source: From “Decoding Jung's Metaphysics: The Archetypal Semantics of an Experiential Universe”. Written by Bernardo Kastrup. Published by IFF Books, Washington DC. Kindle Edition. Page 69-70. Chapter 4.

Pierre-Simon_Laplace

System of Nature

“The present state of the system of nature is evidently a consequence of what it was in the preceding moment, and if we conceive of an intelligence that at a given instant comprehends all the relations of the entities of this universe, it could state the respective position, motions, and general affects of all these entities at any time in the past or future. Physical astronomy, the branch of knowledge that does the greatest honor to the human mind, gives us an idea, albeit imperfect, of what such an intelligence would be. The simplicity of the law by which the celestial bodies move, and the relations of their masses and distances, permit analysis to follow their motions up to a certain point; and in order to determine the state of the system of these great bodies in past or future centuries, it suffices for the mathematician that their position and their velocity be given by observation for any moment in time. Man owes that advantage to the power of the instrument he employs, and to the small number of relations that it embraces in its calculations. But ignorance of the different causes involved in the production of events, as well as their complexity, taken together with the imperfection of analysis, prevents our reaching the same certainty about the vast majority of phenomena. Thus there are things that are uncertain for us, things more or less probable, and we seek to compensate for the impossibility of knowing them by determining their different degrees of likelihood. So it was that we owe to the weakness of the human mind one of the most delicate and ingenious of mathematical theories, the science of chance or probability.”
  • Source: Pierre-Simon Laplace, 'Recherches, 1º, sur l'Intégration des Équations Différentielles aux Différences Finies, et sur leur Usage dans la Théorie des Hasards' (1773, published 1776). In Oeuvres complètes de Laplace, 14 Vols. (1843-1912), Vol. 8, 144-5, trans. Charles Coulston Gillispie, Pierre-Simon Laplace 1749-1827: A Life in Exact Science (1997), 26.

David_E_Nye

Technology Contested

“Technologies are contested terrains. World's fairs, spectacular lighting, and media events all have changed in response to shifting public tastes. Americans had divided reactions to the Apollo Space Program, and they created divergent narratives to understand computers, the electrification of society, and the meanings of energy sources. Technologies are contested, and a close reading of such events... reveals not hegemonic control but a welter of meanings. The public understands technology not as one-dimensional agents of change, but as both enabling and disabling innovations.”
  • Source: A book. Written by David E. Nye. Entitled 'Narratives and Spaces'. Published in 1997 by Univerity of Exeter Press, Exeter, UK. Hardback ISBN 0-85989-555-6. Paperback ISBN 0-85989-556-4. Introduction, page 3.

Karl_Popper

Confirmation Easy

“It is easy to obtain confirmations, or verifications, for nearly every theory — if we look for confirmations. Confirmations should count only if they are the result of risky predictions... A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice. Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or refute it.”
  • Source: Karl Raimund Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (1963), 36.

Eleanor_Roosevelt

Great Minds

“Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.”
  • Source: Attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt in the 1987-10-28 issue of 'The Hutchinson News', Quotable, Hutchinson, Kansas. (NewsBank Access World News).

Rupert_Sheldrake

Evolutionary Randomness

“In neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory randomness plays a central role through the chance mutations of genes, which are quantum events. With different chance events, evolution would happen differently.”
  • Source: Rupert Sheldrake. The book “Science Set Free: 10 Paths to New Discovery”, Prologue, page 15. Published in 2012 by Crown Publishing, New York, NY. Kindle Edition. ISBN: 978-0-7704-3671-1.

Shannon_Vallor

AI Data

“Only a modest subset of what is representable in digital form can be generated or stored in sufficient quantity and quality to be useful... An event that only happens once in a generation, or to one person in a billion, even if it is world-altering, is virtually invisible to a machine learning model.”
  • Source: From the book “The AI Mirror” by Shannon Vallor. Published 2024 by Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0197759066. Chapter 2, page 48.

Shoshana_Zuboff

Informate

“The word that I have coined to describe this unique capacity is informate. Activities, events, and objects are translated into and made visible by information when a technology informates as well as automates.”
  • Source: Zuboff, S. (1988). In The Age Of The Smart Machine: The Future Of Work And Power. New York, NY: Basic Books, p. 10. ISBN:0465032125.