Hypothesizing Quotes

“Science is not about making predictions or performing experiments. Science is about explaining.”
― Bill Gaede

“Every time that we consider our past, examine our present environment, and speculate about the future, we engage in mental projection. Contemplation merges into thinking, and thinking unspools into theorizing suppositions. Every act of attentiveness expands our state of awareness. Deductive surmises represent an ongoing process of making applicable connections between theories and facts. Devising working hypothesis represents one of the highest intellectual achievements of humankind.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“There had always been aspects of the daily management of Birnam Wood that Mira had seen as her beneath her; she had always acted as though the administration and the democratic protocols were unworthy of her attention and her time. It was one of the ways in which the two friends perfectly complemented each other, for as Mira had often pointed out to her, Shelley really rather liked bureaucracy; she found genuine fulfilment in ticking items off a list, and organising, and making blueprints for the future, and establishing processes of feedback and methods of appeal. Mira had no patience for any of that. She loved to speculate, loved to feel the scope and flex of her own imaginative audacity, loved to test and contradict herself, to keep enlarging, constantly, her own sense of what it was possible to hypothesise and conjure up and entertain, and although this roving speculative energy was something Shelley honestly admired and envied about her, she could also see that it amounted, at times, to a kind of capriciousness, even a callousness, when it came to those aspects of mundane existence that could not be posited or wished away. There was a kind of safety in abstraction, Shelley felt, in visions that remained visions, in ideas that remained ideas….”
― Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood