392 Quotes About Theory

You can be involved with theory; you can teach or study theory; you can hate theory or be afraid of it. None of this, though, helps much to understand what theory is.

The sense of beauty of a physical theory must be something hardwired in our brain and not a social construct. It is something that touches some internal chord. When you stumble on a beautiful theory you have the same emotional reaction that you feel in front of a piece of art.

...[P]hysics... [is] the philosophy of nature, so far as it is based on empirical laws.

We present a series of hypotheses and speculations, leading inescapably to the conclusion that SU(5) is the gauge group of the world — that all elementary particle forces (strong, weak, and electromagnetic) are different manifestations of the same fundamental interaction involving a single coupling strength, the fine-structure constant. Our hypotheses may be wrong and our speculations idle, but the uniqueness and simplicity of our scheme are reasons enough that it be taken seriously.

True, the Standard Model does explain a very great deal. Nevertheless it is not yet a proper theory, principally because it does not satisfy the physicists naive faith in elegance and simplicity. It involves some 17 allegedly fundamental particles and the same number of arbitrary and tunable parameters, such as the fine-structure constants, the muon-electron mass ratio and the various mysterious mixing angles.

Une œuvre où il y a des théories est comme un objet sur lequel on laisse la marque du prix.

Do not all charms fly / At the mere touch of cold philosophy?

...[P]hilosophical theories are structured by conceptual metaphors that constrain which inferences can be drawn within that philosophical theory. The (typically unconscious) conceptual metaphors that are constitutive of a philosophical theory have the causal effect of constraining how you can reason within that philosophical framework.

There are those who feel that the world is ultimately moving closer to Truth and to prosperity as the times evolve; then there are those who feel that it is ultimately moving farther away from Truth and into self-destruction. From this, and if it were really that simplistic, one might get the impression that life gravitates slightly into two types of people whom which are diametrically opposed in spirit.