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Theoretical Quotes

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Theoretical Quotes

“If you wish to learn from the theoretical physicist anything about the methods which he uses, I would give you the following piece of advice: Don't listen to his words, examine his achievements. For to the discoverer in that field, the constructions of his imagination appear so necessary and so natural that he is apt to treat them not as the creations of his thoughts but as given realities.”

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Author:Albert Einstein
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“Ironically people will thank a deity for "letting" them win a race, but blame a "witch" if they stumble, look for the nearest suspect, and kill them. Why not blame the deity? Why not accept the setback as easily as they accept the victory/ Time people grew up some, I think - and stopped looking for theoretical "somebodies" to blame for their own misfortunes.”

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Book:Blachart
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“Theory is relevant to you because it shows you a new, simpler, and more elegant side of computers, which we normally consider to be complicated machines. The best computer designs and applications are conceived with elegance in mind. A theoretical course can heighten your aesthetic sense and help you build more beautiful systems.”

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Book:Introduction to the Theory of Computation
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“If I keep observing the uranium, which means a little more than keeping my eyes on the pot on my desk and involves something akin to surrounding it with a whole system of Geiger counters, I can freeze it in such a way that it stops emitting radiation. Although Turing first suggested the idea as a theoretical construct, it turns out that it is not just mathematical fiction. Experiments in the last decade have demonstrated the real possibility of using observation to inhibit the progress of a quantum system.”

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Book:The Great Unknown: Seven Journeys to the Frontiers of Science
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“The abject impulse is inalienably connected with the feminine, specifically the maternal. As it forms out of the undefined morass of relations, surfaces and currents that existed before the Oedipal or mirror-stage coordinated them, the subject seems built around a primal sense of loss. The developing sense of the limits of the body is focussed on those holes in it's surface through which the outside becomes inside and vice versa: the mouth, anus, genitals, even the invisibly porous surface of the skin. It was the mother's body that was most connected with these crossing-points, as it fed and cleaned the undefined infant body. The sense that boundaries and limits are forming around this permable flesh is interpreted then as the withdrawal or even loss, of intimacy with the body of the mother, firstly in the increasing distance of the practical hygiene operations it performs and secondly, more remotely, beyond that in it's archaic ur-form as the body through which the child entered into the world.”

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Author:Nick Mansfield
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“The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted…Classic criticism has never paid any attention to the reader; for it, the writer is the only person in literature…we know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author. [Final passage in "The Death of the Author," in Image-Music-Text, by Roland Barthes, Trans. Stephen Heath (1977)]”

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Book:The Death of the Author
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“... theory is good for you because studying it expands your mind... Specific technical knowledge, though useful today, becomes outdated in just a few years. Consider instead the abilities to think, to express yourself clearly and precisely, to solve problems, and to know when you haven’t solved a problem. These abilities have lasting value. Studying theory trains you in these areas.”

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Book:Introduction to the Theory of Computation
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“One reason that a truth and reconciliation process is needed for group selection is to return to the simplicity of the original problem and Darwin’s solution. As Ed Wilson and I put it in our recent review article titled “Rethinking the Theoretical Foundation of Sociobiology“: Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary.”

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Author:David Sloan Wilson
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“When you put relative and absolute truth together and they become one unit, it becomes possible to make things workable. You are not too much on the side of absolute truth, or you would become too theoretical. You are not too much on the side of relative truth, or you would become too precise. When you put them together, you realize that there is no problem.”

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Author:Chogyam Trungpa
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“Economics is a theoretical science and as such abstains from any judgement of value. It is not its task to tell people what ends they should aim at. It is a science of the means to be applied for attainment of ends chosen, not, to be sure, a science of the choosing of ends. Ultimate decisions, the valuations and the choosing of ends, are beyond the scope of any science. Science never tells a man how he should act; it merely shows how a man must act if he wants to attain definite ends.”

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Book:Human Action
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“The benefits of becoming fluent in a foreign tongue are as underestimated as the difficulty is overestimated. Thousands of theoretical linguists will disagree, but I know from research and personal experimentation with more than a dozen languages that (1) adults can learn languages much faster than children when constant 9-5 work is removed and that (2) it is possible to become conversationally fluent in any language in six months or less. At four hours per day, six months can be whittled down to less than three months.”

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Author:Tim Ferriss
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“When I began my physical studies [in Munich in 1874] and sought advice from my venerable teacher Philipp von Jolly...he portrayed to me physics as a highly developed, almost fully matured science...Possibly in one or another nook there would perhaps be a dust particle or a small bubble to be examined and classified, but the system as a whole stood there fairly secured, and theoretical physics approached visibly that degree of perfection which, for example, geometry has had already for centuries.”

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Author:Max Planck
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“...the physicist cannot simply surrender to the philosopher the critical contemplation of the theoretical foundations; for, he himself knows best, and feels more surely where the shoe pinches...Physical conceptions are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world.”

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Author:Albert Einstein
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“Parking Reform Made Easy provides both a theoretical framework and practical methods for reforming parking requirements. By giving planners a sound basis for developing reforms, Richard Willson remedies the problem that many planners feel unqualified to challenge and change long-standing minimum parking requirements.”

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Author:Donald Shoup
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“This fear of criticism displayed by the advocates of freedom of criticism cannot be attributed solely to craftiness. No, the majority of the Economists look with sincere resentment upon all theoretical controversies, factional disagreements, broad political questions, plans for organising revolutionaries, etc.”

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Book:Izbrannye Proizvedenii͡a V Trekh Tomakh
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“An important contribution to a much-neglected but very important subject. No other author has set out to do what Davenport accomplishes, which is a systematic study of how key representatives of America's rising tide of religion attempted a theoretical understanding of, and practical response to, America's rising tide of commerce.”

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Author:Mark Noll
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“It turns out that the men who ultimately, who unpretentiously value peace are willing to sacrifice their own peace of mind in order to render it. The question is, 'Who, between opposing forces, would do such a thing?' It seems only theoretical albeit true that men who accept an objective rather than subjective moral standard are, in a general sense, more capable of making such sacrifices for the sake of peace.”

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Book:Killosophy
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“I think my dad [ Stephen Hawking] would have been pleased if I had turned out a scientist because he truly believes that is the most interesting career open to anyone. But he also believes that you have to follow your own path in life and so he certainly wasn't going to push me toward theoretical physics when it didn't look like I was going in that direction naturally.”

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Author:Stephen Hawking
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