Explanation Quotes - Page 31

• Unfortunately, in the field of evolution most explanations are not good. As a matter of fact, they hardly qualify as explanations at all; they are suggestions, hunches, pipe dreams, hardly worthy of being called hypotheses.

  Norman Macbeth

  Dream, Suggestions, Matter

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• It seems to me that the term 'free will' is one of the most manipulated and exploited terms. The real explanation of free will is not that you have free will but that your will can eventually make you free, that will can liberate you, that will can release you from slavery.

  Torkom Saraydarian

  Motivational, Real, Slavery

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• In those same decades, most UFO sightings were made in the daytime and frequently at close range, when shapes and surface features could be distinguished, thus making positive identification of normal sights easier and the descriptions of unusual sights more detailed. When all normal explanations had been eliminated, the witnesses could concentrate on those aspects of the experience which were most abnormal.

  Don Berliner

  Sight, Abnormal, Shapes

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• We need to raise the level of our game in terms of explaining the planetary warming by infrared absorption of CO2 etc. The missing area of understanding seems to be the actual physical mechanism. Lets target an explanation at an audience that has taken 1 year each of undergraduate physics and chemistry, plus calculus. Once we have something that is convincing at this level, we can work on how to communicate this to the interested public (i.e. those that hang out in the climate blogosphere). Willis Eschenbach’s help is needed in translating this for the WUWT crowd.

  Judith Curry

  Taken, Years, Games

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• The technical explanation is that the market-sensitive risk models used by thousands of market participants work on the assumption that each user is the only person using them.

  Avinash Persaud

  Risk, Management, Assumption

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• With the destruction of history, contemporary events themselves retreat into a remote and fabulous realm of unverifiable stories, uncheckable statistics, unlikely explanations and untenable reasoning.

  Guy Debord

  Events, Stories, Statistics

  Guy Debord (1998). “Comments on the Society of the Spectacle”, p.16, Verso

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• Has the word propitiation any place in your Christianity?  In the faith of the New Testament it is central.  The love of God, the taking of human form by the Son, the meaning of the cross, Christ's heavenly intercession, the way of salvation-all are to be explained in terms of itand any explanation from which the thought of propitiation is missing will be incomplete, and indeed actually misleading, by New Testament standards

  J. I. Packer

  Son, Missing, Way

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• Men develop ideas and systems of explanation by absorbing past knowledge and critiquing and superseding it. Women, ignorant of their own history [do] not know what women before them had thought and taught. So generation after generation, they [struggle] for insights others had already had before them, [resulting in] the constant inventing of the wheel.

  Gerda Lerner

  Struggle, Past, Men

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• The simplest explanation is most often the correct one.

  Lincoln Child

  Simplest

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• I am perfectly convinced that I have both seen, and heard in a manner which should make unbelief impossible, things called spiritual which cannot be taken by a rational being to be capable of explanation by imposture, coincidence, or mistake.

  Augustus De Morgan

  Spiritual, Mistake, Taken

  Augustus De Morgan (1863). “From Matter to Spirit: The Result of Ten Years'experience in Spirit Manifestations. Intended as a Guide to Enquirers”, London, Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, & Green

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• Introverts keep their best stuff inside—that is, until it is ready. And this drives extroverts crazy! The explanation for the introvert’s behavior—and there must be an explanation for this behavior, say the extroverts—is that he or she is antisocial, out of touch, or simply a snob.

  Laurie Helgoe

  Crazy, Extroverts, Stuff

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• A detective with his murder mystery, a chemist seeking the structure of a new compound, use little of the formal and logical modes of reasoning. Through a series of intuitions, surmises, fancies, they stumble upon the right explanation, and have a knack of seizing it when it once comes within reach.

  Gilbert N. Lewis

  Murder Mysteries, Intuition, Littles

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• If alpha [the fine-structure constant] were bigger than it really is, we should not be able to distinguish matter from ether [the vacuum, nothingness], and our task to disentangle the natural laws would be hopelessly difficult. The fact however that alpha has just its value 1/137 is certainly no chance but itself a law of nature. It is clear that the explanation of this number must be the central problem of natural philosophy.

  Max Born

  Philosophy, Law, Numbers

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• It from bit symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom...an immaterial source and explanation...that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and that this is a participatory universe.

  John Archibald Wheeler

  Ideas, World, Information

  "Complexity, Entropy and the Physics of Information" edited by Wojciech H. Zurek, (p. 5), 1990.

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• The underlying physical laws necessary for the mathematical theory of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, and the difficulty is only that the exact application of these laws leads to equations much too complicated to be soluble. It therefore becomes desirable that approximate practical methods of applying quantum mechanics should be developed, which can lead to an explanation of the main features of complex atomic systems without too much computation.

  Paul Dirac

  Law, Too Much, Chemistry

  Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac (1995). “Sammlung”, p.391, Cambridge University Press

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• We like t'believe that everything's got an explanation...that our years on this earth make a safe kinda sense. We build ourselves up with explantions and rationalizations t'make us nice and comfortable--an' some people manage t'get through their lives without ever having to question any of it. But I think most of us have learned that...just when we least expect it...something comes droppin' down out o' the heavens...that blows all our comfortable ideas right t'pieces.

  Jonathan Kent

  Nice, Believe, Blow

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• As time passed I became an avid reader of popular scientific books, wanting to know as much as I could about the world in which I lived. Gradually I began to see a pattern of nonsense in much scientific writing. Scientific explanations given regarding the origins or functioning of various phenomena simply didn't make sense.

  Vine Deloria Jr.

  Book, Writing, Avid

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• Conversation! Supple sentences, with first and second meanings and overtones beyond, outrageous challenges with cleverly planned slip-points, rebuttals of elegant brevity; deceptions and guiles, patient explanations of the obvious, fleeting allusions to the unthinkable. As a preliminary, the conversationalist must gauge the mood, the intelligence and the verbal facility of the company. To this end, a few words of pedantic exposition often prove invaluable.

  Jack Vance

  Challenges, Deception, Fleeting

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• Correlations are not explanations and besides, they can be as spurious as the high correlation in Finland between foxes killed and divorces.

  Gunnar Myrdal

  Divorce, Foxes, Finland

  "Beyond the Welfare State" by Gunnar Myrdal, New Haven, 1958.

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• Explanations are a substitute for trust.

  Tullian Tchividjian

  Substitutes

  Tullian Tchividjian (2009). “Do I Know God?: Finding Certainty in Life's Most Important Relationship”, p.162, Multnomah

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• It is prima facie highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection. We are supposed to abandon this naïve response, not in favor of a fully worked out physical/chemical explanation but in favor of an alternative that is really a schema for explanation, supported by some examples. What is lacking, to my knowledge, is a credible argument that the story has a nonnegligible probability of being true.

  Thomas Nagel

  Together, Example, Alternatives

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• The remarkable insights that science affords us into the intelligible workings of the world cry out for an explanation more profound than that which itself can provide. Religion, if it is to take seriously its claim that the world is the creation of god, must be humble enough to learn from science what that world is actually like. The dialogue between them can only be mutually enriching.

  John Polkinghorne

  Humble, Profound, World

  John Polkinghorne (1995). “Serious Talk: Science and Religion in Dialogue”, p.75, A&C Black

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• The hallmark of a deep explanation is that it answers more than you ask

  Max Tegmark

  Inspirational, Answers, Hallmark

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• Discovering a new explanation is inherently an act of creativity.

  David Deutsch

  Creativity, Discovering

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• But that night as I drove back to Montreal, I at least discovered this: that there is no simple explanation for anything important any of us do, and that the human tragedy, or the human irony, consists in the necessity of living with the consequences of actions performed under the pressure of compulsions so obscure we do not and cannot understand them.

  Hugh MacLennan

  Simple, Night, Tragedy

  Hugh MacLennan (2009). “Watch that Ends the Night”, p.266, McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

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