Statistical Tools III: Cards

"In short, absolute, so-called mathematical factors never find a firm basis in military calculations. From the very start there is an interplay of possibilities, probabilities, good luck and bad that weaves its way throughout the length and breadth of the tapestry. In the whole range the human activities war most closely resembles a game of cards." (Carl von Clausewitz, "On War", 1832)

"Scientific facts accumulate rapidly, and give rise to theories with almost equal rapidity. These theories are often wonderfully enticing, and one is apt to pass from one to another, from theory to theory, without taking care to establish each before passing on to the next, without assuring oneself that the foundation on which one is building is secure. Then comes the crash; the last theory breaks down utterly, and on attempting to retrace our steps to firm ground and start anew, we may find too late that one of the cards, possibly at the very foundation of the pagoda, is either faultily placed or in itself defective, and that this blemish easily remedied if detected in time has, neglected, caused the collapse of the whole structure on whose erection so much skill and perseverance have been spent." (Arthur M Marshall, 1894)

"If you take a pack of cards as it comes from the maker and shuffle it for a few minutes, all trace of the original systematic order disappears. The order will never come back however long you shuffle. Something has been done which cannot be undone, namely, the introduction of a random element in place of the arrangement." (Sir Arthur S Eddington, "The Nature of the Physical World", 1928)

"It seems hard to sneak a look at God's cards. But that He plays dice and uses 'telepathic' methods [...] is something that I cannot believe for a single moment." (Albert Einstein, [Letter to Cornel Lanczos] 1942)

"We must emphasize that such terms as 'select at random', 'choose at random', and the like, always mean that some mechanical device, such as coins, cards, dice, or tables of random numbers, is used." (Frederick Mosteller et al, "Principles of Sampling", Journal of the American Statistical Association Vol. 49 (265), 1954)

"A thorough understanding of game theory, should dim these greedy hopes. Knowledge of game theory does not make one a better card player, businessman or military strategist." (Anatol Rapoport, "The Use and Misuse of Game Theory," 1962)

"Life is like a game of cards. The hand that is dealt you represents determinism. The way you play it is free will." (Jawaharlal Nehru, Saturday Review, 1967)

"There may be such a thing as habitual luck. People who are said to be lucky at cards probably have certain hidden talents for those games in which skill plays a role. It is like hidden parameters in physics, this ability that does not surface and that I like to call 'habitual luck'." (Stanislaw Ulam, "Adventures of a Mathematician", 1976)

"Gambling was the place where statistics and profound human consequences met most nakedly, after all, and cards, even more than dice or the numbers on a roulette wheel, seemed able to define and perhaps even dictate a player's... luck." (Tim Powers, "Last Call", 1992)

"An example, which, like tossing a coin, is intimately associated with games of chance, is the shuffling of a deck of cards. […] the process is not completely random, if by what happens next we mean the outcome of the next single riffle, since one riffle cannot change any given order of the cards in the deck to any other given order. In particular, a single riffle cannot completely reverse the order of the cards, although a sufficient number of successive riffles, of course, can produce any order." (Edward N Lorenz, "The Essence of Chaos", 1993)

"Whether we shuffle cards or roll dice, chance is only a result of our human lack of deftness: we don't have enough control to immobilize a die at will or to individually direct the cards in a deck. The comparison is an important one nonetheless, and highlights the limits of this method of creating chance - it doesn't matter who rolls the dice, but we wouldn't let just anyone shuffle the cards." (Ivar Ekeland, "The Broken Dice, and Other Mathematical Tales of Chance", 1993)

"To look at the development of physics since Newton is to observe a struggle to define the limits of science. Part of this process has been the intrusion of scientific methods and ideas into domains that have traditionally been the province of metaphysics or religion. In this conflict, Hawking’s phrase ‘to know the Mind of God’ is just one example of a border infringement. But by playing the God card, Hawking has cleverly fanned the flames of his own publicity, appealing directly to the popular allure of the scientist-as-priest." (Peter Coles, "Hawking and the Mind of God", 2000)

"In contrast, the system may be a pack of cards, and the dynamic may be to shuffle the pack and then take the top card. Imagine that the current top card is the ace of spades, and that after shuffling the pack the top card becomes the seven of diamonds. Does that imply that whenever the top card is the ace of spades then the next top card will always be the seven of diamonds? Of course not. So this system is random."(Ian Stewart, "Does God Play Dice: The New Mathematics of Chaos", 2002)

"In modelling terms, the difference between randomness and determinacy is clear enough. The randomness in the pack of cards arises from our failure to prescribe unique rules for getting from the current state to the next one. There are lots of different ways to shuffle a pack. The determinism of the cannonball is a combination of two things: fully prescribed rules of behaviour, and fully defined initial conditions. Notice that in both systems we are thinking on a very short timescale: it is the next state that matters - or, if time is flowing continuously, it is the state a tiny instant into the future. We don't need to consider long-term behaviour to distinguish randomness from determinacy."(Ian Stewart, "Does God Play Dice: The New Mathematics of Chaos", 2002)

"The randomness of the card-shuffle is of course caused by our lack of knowledge of the precise procedure used to shuffle the cards. But that is outside the chosen system, so in our practical sense it is not admissible. If we were to change the system to include information about the shuffling rule – for example, that it is given by some particular computer code for pseudo-random numbers, starting with a given ‘seed value’ – then the system would look deterministic. Two computers of the same make running the same ‘random shuffle’ program would actually produce the identical sequence of top cards."(Ian Stewart, "Does God Play Dice: The New Mathematics of Chaos", 2002)

"Players must accept the cards dealt to them. However, once they have those cards in hand, they alone choose how they will play them. They decide what risks and actions to take." (John C Maxwell, "The Difference Maker: Making Your Attitude Your Greatest Asset", 2006)

"It's a game of a million inferences. There are a lot of things to draw inferences from - cards played and not played. These inferences tell you something about the probabilities. It's got to be the best intellectual exercise out there. You're seeing through new situations every ten minutes. Bridge is about weighing gain/loss ratios. You're doing calculations all the time." (Warren Buffett)

"The card-player begins by arranging his hand for maximum sense. Scientists do the same with the facts they gather." (Isaac Asimov)

Statistical Tools I: Coins

"Equiprobability in the physical world is purely a hypothesis. We may exercise the greatest care and the most accurate of scientific instruments to determine whether or not a penny is symmetrical. Even if we are satisfied that it is, and that our evidence on that point is conclusive, our knowledge, or rather our ignorance, about the vast number of other causes which affect the fall of the penny is so abysmal that the fact of the penny’s symmetry is a mere detail. Thus, the statement 'head and tail are equiprobable' is at best an assumption." (Edward Kasner & James R Newman, "Mathematics and the Imagination", 1940)

"A misunderstanding of Bernoulli’s theorem is responsible for one of the commonest fallacies in the estimation of probabilities, the fallacy of the maturity of chances. When a coin has come down heads twice in succession, gamblers sometimes say that it is more likely to come down tails next time because ‘by the law of averages’ (whatever that may mean) the proportion of tails must be brought right some time." (William Kneale, "Probability and Induction", 1949)

"We must emphasize that such terms as 'select at random', 'choose at random', and the like, always mean that some mechanical device, such as coins, cards, dice, or tables of random numbers, is used." (Frederick Mosteller et al, "Principles of Sampling", Journal of the American Statistical Association Vol. 49 (265), 1954)

"And nobody can get [...] far without at least an acquaintance with the mathematics of probability, not to the extent of making its calculations and filling examination papers with typical equations, but enough to know when they can be trusted, and when they are cooked. For when their imaginary numbers correspond to exact quantities of hard coins unalterably stamped with heads and tails, they are safe within certain limits; for here we have solid certainty [...] but when the calculation is one of no constant and several very capricious variables, guesswork, personal bias, and pecuniary interests, come in so strong that those who began by ignorantly imagining that statistics cannot lie end by imagining equally ignorantly, that they never do anything else." (George B Shaw, "The World of Mathematics", 1956)

"[...] there can be such a thing as a simple probabilistic system. For example, consider the tossing of a penny. Here is a perfectly simple system, but one which is notoriously unpredictable. It maybe described in terms of a binary decision process, with a built-in even probability between the two possible outcomes." (Stafford Beer, "Cybernetics and Management", 1959)

"The shrewd guess, the fertile hypothesis, the courageous leap to a tentative conclusion - these are the most valuable coin of the thinker at work." (Jerome S Bruner, "The Process of Education", 1960)

"No Chancellor of the Exchequer could introduce his proposals for monetary and fiscal policy in the House of Commons by saying 'I have looked at all the forecasts, some go one way, some another; so I decided to toss a coin and assume inflationary tendencies if it came down heads and deflationary if it came down tails' [...] And statistics, however uncertain, can apparently provide some basis." (Ely Devons, "Essays in Economics", 1961)

"The equanimity of your average tosser of coins depends upon a law, or rather a tendency, or let us say a probability, or at any rate a mathematically calculable chance, which ensures that he will not upset himself by losing too much nor upset his opponent by winning too often." (Tom Stoppard, "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead", 1967)

"A significant property of the value function, called loss aversion, is that the response to losses is more extreme than the response to gains. The common reluctance to accept a fair bet on the toss of a coin suggests that the displeasure of losing a sum of money exceeds the pleasure of winning the same amount. Thus the proposed value function is (i) defined on gains and losses, (ii) generally concave for gains and convex for losses, and (iii) steeper for losses than for gains." (Amos Tversky & Daniel Kahneman, "Rational Choice and the Framing of Decisions", The Journal of Business Vol. 59 (4), 1986)

"Flip a coin 100 times. Assume that 99 heads are obtained. If you ask a statistician, the response is likely to be: 'It is a biased coin'. But if you ask a probabilist, he may say: 'Wooow, what a rare event'." (Chamont Wang, "Sense and Nonsense of Statistical Inference", 1993)

"The coin is an example of complete randomness. It is the sort of randomness that one commonly has in mind when thinking of random numbers, or deciding to use a random-number generator." (Edward N Lorenz, "The Essence of Chaos", 1993)

"Losing streaks and winning streaks occur frequently in games of chance, as they do in real life. Gamblers respond to these events in asymmetric fashion: they appeal to the law of averages to bring losing streaks to a speedy end. And they appeal to that same law of averages to suspend itself so that winning streaks will go on and on. The law of averages hears neither appeal. The last sequence of throws of the dice conveys absolutely no information about what the next throw will bring. Cards, coins, dice, and roulette wheels have no memory." (Peter L Bernstein, "Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk", 1996)

"The dice and the roulette wheel, along with the stock market and the bond market, are natural laboratories for the study of risk because they lend themselves so readily to quantification; their language is the language of numbers." (Peter L Bernstein, "Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk", 1996)

"However, random walk theory also tells us that the chance that the balance never returns to zero - that is, that H stays in the lead for ever - is 0. This is the sense in which the 'law of averages' is true. If you wait long enough, then almost surely the numbers of heads and tails will even out. But this fact carries no implications about improving your chances of winning, if you're betting on whether H or T turns up. The probabilities are unchanged, and you don't know how long the 'long run' is going to be. Usually it is very long indeed." (Ian Stewart, The Magical Maze: Seeing the world through mathematical eyes", 1997)

"In everyday language, a fair coin is called random, but not a coin that shows head more often than tail. A coin that keeps a memory of its own record of heads and tails is viewed as even less random. This mental picture is present in the term random walk, especially as used in finance." (Benoit B Mandelbrot, "Fractals and Scaling in Finance: Discontinuity, concentration, risk", 1997)

"The basis of many misconceptions about probability is a belief in something usually referred to as 'the law of averages', which alleges that any unevenness in random events gets ironed out in the long run. For example, if a tossed coin keeps coming up heads, then it is widely believed that at some stage there will be a predominance of tails to balance things out." (Ian Stewart, The Magical Maze: Seeing the world through mathematical eyes", 1997)

"Sequences of random numbers also inevitably display certain regularities. […] The trouble is, just as no real die, coin, or roulette wheel is ever likely to be perfectly fair, no numerical recipe produces truly random numbers. The mere existence of a formula suggests some sort of predictability or pattern." (Ivars Peterson, "The Jungles of Randomness: A Mathematical Safari", 1998)

"If sinks, sources, saddles, and limit cycles are coins landing heads or tails, then the exceptions are a coin landing on edge. Yes, it might happen, in theory; but no, it doesn't, in practice." (Ian Stewart, "Does God Play Dice: The New Mathematics of Chaos", 2002)

"It's a bit like having a theory about coins that move in space, but only being able to measure their state by interrupting them with a table. We hypothesize that the coin may be able to revolve in space, a state that is neither ‘heads’ nor ‘tails’ but a kind of mixture. Our experimental proof is that when you stick a table in, you get heads half the time and tails the other half - randomly. This is by no means a perfect analogy with standard quantum theory - a revolving coin is not exactly in a superposition of heads and tails - but it captures some of the flavour." (Ian Stewart, "Does God Play Dice: The New Mathematics of Chaos", 2002)

"The chance events due to deterministic chaos, on the other hand, occur even within a closed system determined by immutable laws. Our most cherished examples of chance - dice, roulette, coin-tossing – seem closer to chaos than to the whims of outside events. So, in this revised sense, dice are a good metaphor for chance after all. It's just that we've refined our concept of randomness. Indeed, the deterministic but possibly chaotic stripes of phase space may be the true source of probability." (Ian Stewart, "Does God Play Dice: The New Mathematics of Chaos", 2002)

"The possibility of translating uncertainties into risks is much more restricted in the propensity view. Propensities are properties of an object, such as the physical symmetry of a die. If a die is constructed to be perfectly symmetrical, then the probability of rolling a six is 1 in 6. The reference to a physical design, mechanism, or trait that determines the risk of an event is the essence of the propensity interpretation of probability. Note how propensity differs from the subjective interpretation: It is not sufficient that someone’s subjective probabilities about the outcomes of a die roll are coherent, that is, that they satisfy the laws of probability. What matters is the die’s design. If the design is not known, there are no probabilities." (Gerd Gigerenzer, "Calculated Risks: How to know when numbers deceive you", 2002)

"Randomness is a difficult notion for people to accept. When events come in clusters and streaks, people look for explanations and patterns. They refuse to believe that such patterns - which frequently occur in random data - could equally well be derived from tossing a coin. So it is in the stock market as well." (Didier Sornette, "Why Stock Markets Crash: Critical events in complex financial systems", 2003)

"Suppose that while flipping a coin, a small black hole passed by and ate the coin. As long as we got to see the coin, the probabilities of heads and tails would add to one, but the possibility of a coin disappearing altogether into a black hole would have to be included. Once the coin crosses the event horizon of the black hole, it simply does not meaningfully exist in our universe anymore. Can we simply adjust our probabilistic interpretation to accommodate this outcome? Will we ever encounter negative probabilities?" (Leon M Lederman & Christopher T Hill, "Symmetry and the Beautiful Universe", 2004)

"A bit involves both probability and an experiment that decides a binary or yes-no question. Consider flipping a coin. One bit of in-formation is what we learn from the flip of a fair coin. With an unfair or biased coin the odds are other than even because either heads or tails is more likely to appear after the flip. We learn less from flipping the biased coin because there is less surprise in the outcome on average. Shannon's bit-based concept of entropy is just the average information of the experiment. What we gain in information from the coin flip we lose in uncertainty or entropy." (Bart Kosko, "Noise", 2006)

"Random number generators do not always need to be symmetrical. This misconception of assuming equal likelihood for each outcome is fostered in a restricted learning environment, where learners see only such situations (that is, dice, coins and spinners). It is therefore very important for learners to be aware of situations where the different outcomes are not equally likely (as with the drawing-pins example)." (Alan Graham, "Developing Thinking in Statistics", 2006)

"The objectivist view is that probabilities are real aspects of the universe - propensities of objects to behave in certain ways - rather than being just descriptions of an observer’s degree of belief. For example, the fact that a fair coin comes up heads with probability 0.5 is a propensity of the coin itself. In this view, frequentist measurements are attempts to observe these propensities. Most physicists agree that quantum phenomena are objectively probabilistic, but uncertainty at the macroscopic scale - e.g., in coin tossing - usually arises from ignorance of initial conditions and does not seem consistent with the propensity view." (Stuart J Russell & Peter Norvig, "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach", 2010)

"A very different - and very incorrect - argument is that successes must be balanced by failures (and failures by successes) so that things average out. Every coin flip that lands heads makes tails more likely. Every red at roulette makes black more likely. […] These beliefs are all incorrect. Good luck will certainly not continue indefinitely, but do not assume that good luck makes bad luck more likely, or vice versa." (Gary Smith, "Standard Deviations", 2014)

"Remember that even random coin flips can yield striking, even stunning, patterns that mean nothing at all. When someone shows you a pattern, no matter how impressive the person’s credentials, consider the possibility that the pattern is just a coincidence. Ask why, not what. No matter what the pattern, the question is: Why should we expect to find this pattern?" (Gary Smith, "Standard Deviations", 2014)

"We are seduced by patterns and we want explanations for these patterns. When we see a string of successes, we think that a hot hand has made success more likely. If we see a string of failures, we think a cold hand has made failure more likely. It is easy to dismiss such theories when they involve coin flips, but it is not so easy with humans. We surely have emotions and ailments that can cause our abilities to go up and down. The question is whether these fluctuations are important or trivial." (Gary Smith, "Standard Deviations", 2014)

"When statisticians, trained in math and probability theory, try to assess likely outcomes, they demand a plethora of data points. Even then, they recognize that unless it’s a very simple and controlled action such as flipping a coin, unforeseen variables can exert significant influence." (Zachary Karabell, "The Leading Indicators: A short history of the numbers that rule our world", 2014)

Statistical Tools II: Dices

"God's dice always have a lucky roll." (Sophocles, 5th century BC)

"[...] to repeat the same throw ten thousand times with the dice would be impossible, whereas to make it once or twice is comparatively easy." (Aristotle, "On the Heavens", cca. 350 BC)

"Four dice are cast and a Venus throw results-that is chance; but do you think it would be chance, too, if in one hundred casts you made one hundred Venus throws? It is possible for paints flung at rando mon a canvas to form the outline of a face; but do you imagine that an accidental scattering of pigments could produce the beautiful portrait of Venus of Cos? Suppose that a hog should form a letter 'A' on the ground with its snout; is that a reason for believing that it could write out Ennius's poem The Andromche?" (Marcus Tullius Cicero, cca. 44 BC)

"Is it possible, then, for any man to apprehend in advance occurrences for which no cause or reason can be assigned? What do we mean when we employ such terms as luck, fortune, accident, turn of the die, except that we are seeking to describe events which happened and came to pass in such a way that they either might not have happened and come to pass at all or might have happened and come to pass under quite different circumstances? How then can an event be anticipated and predicted which occurs fortuitously and as a result of blind chance and of the spinning of Fortune's wheel?" (Marcus Tullius Cicero, "De Divinatione", 44 BC)

"A perfect equity adjusts its balance in all parts of life. The dice of God are always loaded. The world looks like a multiplication-table, or a mathematical equation, which, turn it how you will, balances itself." (Ralph W Emerson, "Compensation", 1841)

"Without doubt, matter is unlimited in extent, and, in this sense, infinite; and the forces of Nature mould it into an innumerable number of worlds. Would it be at all astonishing if, from the universal dice-box, out of an innumberable number of throws, there should be thrown out one world infinitely perfect? Nay, does not the calculus of probabilities prove to us that one such world out of an infinite number, must be produced of necessity?" (Philippe Buchez & William B Greene, "Remarks on the Science of History: Followed by an a priori autobiography", 1849)

"A throw of the dice will never abolish chance." (Stéphane Mallarmé, 1897)

"If the world may be thought of as a certain definite quantity of force and as a certain definite number of centers of force—and every other representation remains indefinite and therefore useless—it follows that, in the great dice game of existence, it must pass through calculable number of combinations. In infinite time, every possible combination would at some time or another be realized; more: it would be realized an infinite number of times. And since between every combination and its next recurrence all other possible combinations would have to take place, and each of these combination conditions of the entire sequence of combinations in the same series, a circular movement of absolutely identical series is thus demonstrated: the world as a circular movement that has already repeated itself infinitely often and plays its game in infinitum. This conception is not simply a mechanistic conception; for if it were that, it would not condition an infinite recurrence of identical cases, but a final state. Because the world has not reached this, mechanistic theory must be considered an imperfect and merely provisional hypothesis." (Friedrich Nietzsche, "The Will to Power", [notes written 1883-1888] 1901)

"Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the "old one." I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice." (Albert Einstein, [Letter to Max Born] 1926)

"It seems hard to sneak a look at God's cards. But that He plays dice and uses 'telepathic' methods [...] is something that I cannot believe for a single moment." (Albert Einstein, [Letter to Cornel Lanczos] 1942)

"You believe in the God who plays dice, and I in complete law and order in a world that objectively exists, and which I, in a wildly speculative way, am trying to capture. [...] Even the great initial success of the quantum theory does not make me believe in the fundamental dice-game, although I am well aware that our younger colleagues interpret this as a consequence of senility. No doubt the day will come when we will see whose instinctive attitude was the correct one." (Albert Einstein, [Letter to Max Born] 1944)

"If God has made the world a perfect mechanism, He has at least conceded so much to our imperfect intellect that in order to predict little parts of it, we need not solve innumerable differential equations, but can use dice with fair success." (Max Born, "Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist", 1949)

"In the game of heads and tails, if head comes up a hundred times in a row then this appears to us extraordinary, because after dividing the nearly infinite number of combinations that can arise in a hundred throws into regular sequences, or those in which we observe a rule that is easy to grasp, and into irregular sequences, the latter are incomparably more numerous." (Pierre-Simon Laplace, "A Philosophical Essay on Probability Theories", 1951)

"The picture of scientific method drafted by modern philosophy is very different from traditional conceptions. Gone is the ideal of a universe whose course follows strict rules, a predetermined cosmos that unwinds itself like an unwinding clock. Gone is the ideal of the scientist who knows the absolute truth. The happenings of nature are like rolling dice rather than like revolving stars; they are controlled by probability laws, not by causality, and the scientist resembles a gambler more than a prophet. He can tell you only his best posits - he never knows beforehand whether they will come true. He is a better gambler, though, than the man at the green table, because his statistical methods are superior. And his goal is staked higher - the goal of foretelling the rolling dice of the cosmos. If he is asked why he follows his methods, with what title he makes his predictions, he cannot answer that he has an irrefutable knowledge of the future; he can only lay his best bets. But he can prove that they are best bets, that making them is the best he can do - and if a man does his best, what else can you ask of him?" (Hans Reichenbach, "The Rise of Scientific Philosophy", 1951)

"We must emphasize that such terms as 'select at random', 'choose at random', and the like, always mean that some mechanical device, such as coins, cards, dice, or tables of random numbers, is used." (Frederick Mosteller et al, "Principles of Sampling", Journal of the American Statistical Association Vol. 49 (265), 1954)

"Consideration of particle emission from black holes would seem to suggest that God not only plays dice, but also sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen." (Stephen Hawking, "The Quantum Mechanics of Black Holes", Scientific American, 1977)

"Not only does God play dice with the world - He does not let us see what He has rolled." (Stanisław Lem, "Imaginary Magnitude", 1981)

"Specialists [...] are slowly coming to the realization that the universe is biased and leans to the left. [...] Many scientists have come to believe that this odd state of affairs has somethittg to do with the weak nuclear force. It seems that the weak force tends to impart a left-handed spin to electrons, and this effect may bias some kinds of molecular synthesis to the left. [...] But scientific speculation of this ilk leads to a deeper question. Was it purely a matter of chance that left-handedness became the preferred direction in our universe, or is there some reason behind it? Did the sinister bent of existence that scientists have observed stem from a roll of the dice, or is God a semiambidextrous southpaw?" (Malcolm W Browne, 1986)

"[In statistics] you have the fact that the concepts are not very clean. The idea of probability, of randomness, is not a clean mathematical idea. You cannot produce random numbers mathematically. They can only be produced by things like tossing dice or spinning a roulette wheel. With a formula, any formula, the number you get would be predictable and therefore not random. So as a statistician you have to rely on some conception of a world where things happen in some way at random, a conception which mathematicians don’t have." (Lucien LeCam, [interview] 1988)

"Combinatorics, a sort of glorified dice-throwing." (Robert Kanigel, "The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan", 1991)

"Nature is never perfectly symmetric. Nature's circles always have tiny dents and bumps. There are always tiny fluctuations, such as the thermal vibration of molecules. These tiny imperfections load Nature's dice in favour of one or other of the set of possible effects that the mathematics of perfect symmetry considers to be equally possible." (Ian Stewart & Martin Golubitsky, "Fearful Symmetry: Is God a Geometer?", 1992)

"It is true that every aspect of the roll of dice may be suspect: the dice themselves, the form and texture of the surface, the person throwing them. If we push the analysis to its extreme, we may even wonder what chance has to do with it at all. Neither the course of the dice nor their rebounds rely on chance; they are governed by the strict determinism of rational mechanics. Billiards is based on the same principles, and it has never been considered a game of chance. So in the final analysis, chance lies in the clumsiness, the inexperience, or the naiveté of the thrower - or in the eye of the observer." (Ivar Ekeland, "The Broken Dice, and Other Mathematical Tales of Chance", 1993)

"Whether we shuffle cards or roll dice, chance is only a result of our human lack of deftness: we don't have enough control to immobilize a die at will or to individually direct the cards in a deck. The comparison is an important one nonetheless, and highlights the limits of this method of creating chance - it doesn't matter who rolls the dice, but we wouldn't let just anyone shuffle the cards." (Ivar Ekeland, "The Broken Dice, and Other Mathematical Tales of Chance", 1993)

"So Einstein was wrong when he said, 'God does not play dice'. Consideration of black holes suggests, not only that God does play dice, but that he sometimes confuses us by throwing them where they can't be seen." (Stephen Hawking, 1994)

"Yet, Einstein's theories are also not the last word: quantum theory and relativity are inconsistent, and Einstein himself, proclaiming that 'God does not play dice!', rejected the basic reliance of quantum theory on chance events, and looked forward to a theory which would be deterministic. Recent experiments suggest that this view of Einstein's conflicts with his other deeply held beliefs about the nature of the physical universe. Certain it is that somewhere, beyond physicists' current horizons, are even more powerful theories of how the world is." (David Wells, "You Are a Mathematician: A wise and witty introduction to the joy of numbers", 1995)

"In systems such as contemporary society, evolution is always a promise and devolution is always a threat. No system comes with a guarantee of ongoing evolution. The challenge is real. To ignore it is to play dice with all we have. To accept it is not to play God - it is to become an instrument of whatever divine purpose infuses the universe." (Ervin László, "The systems view of the world", 1996)

"[...] an apparently random universe could be obeying every whim of a deterministic deity who chooses how the dice roll; a universe that has obeyed perfect mathematical laws for the last ten billion years could suddenly start to play truly random dice. So the distinction is about how we model the system, and what point of view seems most useful, rather than about any inherent feature of the system itself." (Ian Stewart, "Does God Play Dice: The New Mathematics of Chaos", 1997)

"Chaos teaches us that anybody, God or cat, can play dice deterministically, while the naïve onlooker imagines that something random is going on." (Ian Stewart, "Does God Play Dice: The New Mathematics of Chaos", 1997)

"Indeed a deterministic die behaves very much as if it has six attractors, the steady states corresponding to its six faces, all of whose basins are intertwined. For technical reasons that can't quite be true, but it is true that deterministic systems with intertwined basins are wonderful substitutes for dice; in fact they're super-dice, behaving even more ‘randomly’ - apparently - than ordinary dice. Super-dice are so chaotic that they are uncomputable. Even if you know the equations for the system perfectly, then given an initial state, you cannot calculate which attractor it will end up on. The tiniest error of approximation – and there will always be such an error - will change the answer completely." (Ian Stewart, "Does God Play Dice: The New Mathematics of Chaos", 1997)

"Perhaps God can play dice, and create a universe of complete law and order, in the same breath." (Ian Stewart, "Does God Play Dice: The New Mathematics of Chaos", 1997)

"Simple laws may not produce simple behaviour. Deterministic laws can produce behaviour that appears random. Order can breed its own kind of chaos. The question is not so much whether God plays dice, but how God plays dice.", 1997)

"The chance events due to deterministic chaos, on the other hand, occur even within a closed system determined by immutable laws. Our most cherished examples of chance - dice, roulette, coin-tossing - seem closer to chaos than to the whims of outside events. So, in this revised sense, dice are a good metaphor for chance after all. It's just that we've refined our concept of randomness. Indeed, the deterministic but possibly chaotic stripes of phase space may be the true source of probability." (Ian Stewart, "Does God Play Dice: The New Mathematics of Chaos", 1997)

"[…] we would like to observe that the butterfly effect lies at the root of many events which we call random. The final result of throwing a dice depends on the position of the hand throwing it, on the air resistance, on the base that the die falls on, and on many other factors. The result appears random because we are not able to take into account all of these factors with sufficient accuracy. Even the tiniest bump on the table and the most imperceptible move of the wrist affect the position in which the die finally lands. It would be reasonable to assume that chaos lies at the root of all random phenomena." (Iwo Bialynicki-Birula & Iwona Bialynicka-Birula, "Modeling Reality: How Computers Mirror Life", 2004)

"Random number generators do not always need to be symmetrical. This misconception of assuming equal likelihood for each outcome is fostered in a restricted learning environment, where learners see only such situations (that is, dice, coins and spinners). It is therefore very important for learners to be aware of situations where the different outcomes are not equally likely (as with the drawing-pins example)." (Alan Graham, "Developing Thinking in Statistics", 2006)

"There is no such thing as randomness. No one who could detect every force operating on a pair of dice would ever play dice games, because there would never be any doubt about the outcome. The randomness, such as it is, applies to our ignorance of the possible outcomes. It doesn’t apply to the outcomes themselves. They are 100% determined and are not random in the slightest. Scientists have become so confused by this that they now imagine that things really do happen randomly, i.e. for no reason at all." (Thomas Stark, "God Is Mathematics: The Proofs of the Eternal Existence of Mathematics", 2018)

"God may not play dice with the universe, but something strange is going on with the prime numbers." (Paul Erdos)

"God plays dice with the universe, but they’re loaded dice. And the main objective of physics now is to find out by what rules were they loaded and how can we use them for our own ends." (Joseph Ford)

"I shall never believe that God plays dice with the world." (Albert Einstein)

"The perfect die does not lose its usefulness or justification by the fact that real dice fail to live up to it." (William Feller)

On Facts (2010-2019)

"Actually, around 80% of the data we use to make decisions is already in our heads before we engage with a situation. Our power to perceive is governed and limited by cognitive filters, sometimes termed our ‘mental model’. Mental models are formed as a result of past experience, knowledge and attitudes. They are deeply ingrained, often subconscious, structures that limit what we perceive and also colour our interpretation of supposed facts." (Robina Chatham & Brian Sutton, "Changing the IT Leader’s Mindset", 2010)

"Because the question for me was always whether that shape we see in our lives was there from the beginning or whether these random events are only called a pattern after the fact. Because otherwise we are nothing." (Cormac McCarthy, "All the Pretty Horses", 2010)

"Each person has a different mental model and, therefore, potentially a different interpretation of the Facts. The danger comes when we start to assume that our interpretation of the Facts is the only interpretation and we believe that what we see and think is the Truth, and that there is only one Truth." (Robina Chatham & Brian Sutton, "Changing the IT Leader’s Mindset", 2010)

"Relevance is not something you can predict. It is something you discover after the fact." (Thomas Sowell, "The Thomas Sowell Reader", 2011)

"Science does not live with facts alone. In addition to facts, it needs models. Scientific models fulfill two main functions with respect to empirical facts." (Andreas Bartels [in "Models, Simulations, and the Reduction of Complexity", Ed. by Ulrich Gähde et al, 2013)

"The art of reasoned persuasion is an iterative, recursive heuristic, meaning that we must go back and forth between the facts and the rules until we have a good fit. We cannot see the facts properly until we know what framework to place them into, and we cannot determine what framework to place them into until we see the basic contours of the facts." (Joel P Trachtman, "The Tools of Argument", 2013)

"A mental representation is a mental structure that corresponds to an object, an idea, a collection of information, or anything else, concrete or abstract, that the brain is thinking about. […] Because the details of mental representations can differ dramatically from field to field, it’s hard to offer an overarching definition that is not too vague, but in essence these representations are preexisting patterns of information - facts, images, rules, relationships, and so on - that are held in long-term memory and that can be used to respond quickly and effectively in certain types of situations." (Anders Ericsson & Robert Pool," Peak: Secrets from  the  New  Science  of  Expertise", 2016)

"Statistics is the science of collecting, organizing, and interpreting numerical facts, which we call data. […] Statistics is the science of learning from data." (Moore McCabe & Alwan Craig, "The Practice of Statistics for Business and Economics" 4th Ed., 2016)

"That is the trouble with facts: they sometimes force you to conclusions that di?er with your intuition." (Steven G Krantz, "A Primer of Mathematical Writing" 2nd Ed., 2016)

"[Statistics: used with a plural verb] facts or data, either numerical or nonnumerical, organized and summarized so as to provide useful and accessible information about a particular subject." (Neil A Weiss, "Introductory Statistics" 10th Ed., 2017)

"A mental model is not necessarily founded on facts or complete understanding of reality. Let's be honest, most of our mental models are flawed in many ways, and that's perfectly normal. They work because they are fast and simple and not because they are a complete representation of the reality. […] The most important thing about a person's mental model is that it's simplified and very limited compared to what it models." (Peter W Szabo, "User Experience Mapping", 2017)

On Facts (2000-2009)

"Modeling involves a style of scientific thinking in which the argument is structured by the model, but in which the application is achieved via a narrative prompted by an external fact, an imagined event or question to be answered." (Uskali Mäki, "Fact and Fiction in Economics: Models, Realism and Social Construction", 2002)

"Metaphor is evidence of the human ability to visualize the universe as a coherent organism. Proof of our capacity, not just to see one thing in another but to change the very nature of things. When a metaphor is accepted as fact, it enters groupthink, taking on an existence in the real world. [...] Metaphor is the default form of thought, providing many angles from which to literally 'see' the world." (Marcel Danesi, "Poetic Logic: The Role of Metaphor in Thought, Language, and Culture", 2004)

"We tackle a multifaceted universe one face at a time, tailoring our models and equations to fit the facts at hand. Whatever mechanical conception proves appropriate, that is the one to use. Discovering worlds within worlds, a practical observer will deal with each realm on its own terms. It is the only sensible approach to take." (Michael Munowitz, "Knowing: The Nature of Physical Law", 2005)

"Although fiction is not fact, paradoxically we need some fictions, particularly mathematical ideas and highly idealized models, to describe, explain, and predict facts.  This is not because the universe is mathematical, but because our brains invent or use refined and law-abiding fictions, not only for intellectual pleasure but also to construct conceptual models of reality." (Mario Bunge, "Chasing Reality: Strife over Realism", 2006)

"Equations are the mathematician's way of working out the value of some unknown quantity from circumstantial evidence. ‘Here are some known facts about an unknown number: deduce the number.’ An equation, then, is a kind of puzzle, centered upon a number. We are not told what this number is, but we are told something useful about it. Our task is to solve the puzzle by finding the unknown number." (Ian Stewart, "Why Beauty Is Truth", 2007)

"Geometrical truth is (as we now speak) synthetic: it states facts about the world. Such truths are not ordinary truths but essential truths, giving the reality of the empirical world in which they are imperfect embodied." (Fred Wilson, "The External World and Our Knowledge of It", 2008)

"There are no surprising facts, only models that are surprised by facts; and if a model is surprised by the facts, it is no credit to that model." (Eliezer S Yudkowsky, "Quantum Explanations", 2008)

"Obviously, the final goal of scientists and mathematicians is not simply the accumulation of facts and lists of formulas, but rather they seek to understand the patterns, organizing principles, and relationships between these facts to form theorems and entirely new branches of human thought." (Clifford A Pickover, "The Math Book", 2009)

On Facts (1990-1999)

"On this view, we recognize science to be the search for algorithmic compressions. We list sequences of observed data. We try to formulate algorithms that compactly represent the information content of those sequences. Then we test the correctness of our hypothetical abbreviations by using them to predict the next terms in the string. These predictions can then be compared with the future direction of the data sequence. Without the development of algorithmic compressions of data all science would be replaced by mindless stamp collecting - the indiscriminate accumulation of every available fact. Science is predicated upon the belief that the Universe is algorithmically compressible and the modern search for a Theory of Everything is the ultimate expression of that belief, a belief that there is an abbreviated representation of the logic behind the Universe's properties that can be written down in finite form by human beings." (John D Barrow, New Theories of Everything", 1991)

"The popular image of mathematics as a collection of precise facts, linked together by well-defined logical paths, is revealed to be false. There is randomness and hence uncertainty in mathematics, just as there is in physics." (Paul Davis, "The Mind of God", 1992)

„[...] there is no criterion for appreciation which does not vary from one epoch to another and from one mathematician to another. [...] These divergences in taste recall the quarrels aroused by works of art, and it is a fact that mathematicians often discuss among themselves whether a theorem is more or less ‚beautiful‘. This never fails to surprise practitioners of other sciences: for them the sole criterion is the 'truth' of a theory or formula." (Jean Dieudonné, „Mathematics - The Music of Reason", 1992)

"The word theory, as used in the natural sciences, doesn’t mean an idea tentatively held for purposes of argument - that we call a hypothesis. Rather, a theory is a set of logically consistent abstract principles that explain a body of concrete facts. It is the logical connections among the principles and the facts that characterize a theory as truth. No one element of a theory [...] can be changed without creating a logical contradiction that invalidates the entire system. Thus, although it may not be possible to substantiate directly a particular principle in the theory, the principle is validated by the consistency of the entire logical structure." (Alan Cromer, "Uncommon Sense: The Heretical Nature of Science", 1993)

"Worldviews are social constructions, and they channel the search for facts. But facts are found and knowledge progresses, however fitfully. Fact and theory are intertwined, and all great scientists understand the interaction." (Stephen Jay Gould, "Shields of Expectation - and Actuality", 1993)

"As a result, surprisingly enough, scientific advance rarely comes solely through the accumulation of new facts. It comes most often through the construction of new theoretical frameworks. [..]  To understand scientific development, it is not enough merely to chronicle new discoveries and inventions. We must also trace the succession of worldviews" (Nancy R Pearcey & Charles B Thaxton, "The Soul of Science: Christian Faith and Natural Philosophy", 1994)

"Clearly, science is not simply a matter of observing facts. Every scientific theory also expresses a worldview. Philosophical preconceptions determine where facts are sought, how experiments are designed, and which conclusions are drawn from them." (Nancy R Pearcey & Charles B. Thaxton, "The Soul of Science: Christian Faith and Natural Philosophy", 1994)

"Mathematics is not just a collection of isolated facts: it is more like a landscape; it has an inherent geography that its users and creators employ to navigate through what would otherwise be an impenetrable jungle." (Ian Stewart, "Nature’s Numbers", 1995)

"Mathematics is not the study of an ideal, preexisting nontemporal reality. Neither is it a chess-like game with made-up symbols and formulas. Rather, it is the part of human studies which is capable of achieving a science-like consensus, capable of establishing reproducible results. The existence of the subject called mathematics is a fact, not a question. This fact means no more and no less than the existence of modes of reasoning and argument about ideas which are compelling an conclusive, ‘noncontroversial when once understood’." (Philip J Davis & Rueben Hersh, "The Mathematical Experience", 1995)

"The shift of paradigms requires an expansion not only of our perceptions and ways of thinking, but also of our values. […] scientific facts emerge out of an entire constellation of human perceptions, values, and actions-in one word, out of a paradigm-from which they cannot be separated. […] Today the paradigm shift in science, at its deepest level, implies a shift from physics to the life sciences." (Fritjof Capra, "The Web of Life", 1996)

"Mathematics is the study of analogies between analogies. All science is. Scientists want to show that things that don’t look alike are really the same. That is one of their innermost Freudian motivations. In fact, that is what we mean by understanding." (Gian-Carlo Rota, "Indiscrete Thoughts", 1997)

"Theories rarely arise as patient inferences forced by accumulated facts. Theories are mental constructs potentiated by complex external prods (including, in idealized cases, a commanding push from empirical reality)." (Stephen J Gould, "Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms" , 1998)

"When we entrust the domain of values to those whose intellectual concerns are essentially centred on empirical facts, and whose conceptual frameworks are inevitably constructed around sets of empirical facts, we need not be surprised if the result is moral confusion." (Ronald W K Paterson, "The New Patricians", 1998)

On Facts (1980-1989)

"[…] there is an external world which can in principle be exhaustively described in scientific language. The scientist, as both observer and language-user, can capture the external facts of the world in propositions that are true if they correspond to the facts and false if they do not. Science is ideally a linguistic system in which true propositions are in one-to-one relation to facts, including facts that are not directly observed because they involve hidden entities or properties, or past events or far distant events. These hidden events are described in theories, and theories can be inferred from observation, that is, the hidden explanatory mechanism of the world can be discovered from what is open to observation. Man as scientist is regarded as standing apart from the world and able to experiment and theorize about it objectively and dispassionately." (Mary B Hesse, "Revolutions and Reconstructions in the Philosophy of Science", 1980)

"Science, since people must do it, is a socially embedded activity. It progresses by hunch, vision, and intuition. Much of its change through time does not record a closer approach to absolute truth, but the alteration of cultural contexts that influence it so strongly. Facts are not pure and unsullied bits of information; culture also influences what we see and how we see it. Theories, moreover, are not inexorable inductions from facts. The most creative theories are often imaginative visions imposed upon facts; the source of imagination is also strongly cultural." (Stephen J Gould, "The Mismeasure of Man", 1980)

"Facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away while scientists debate rival theories for explaining them." (Stephen J Gould "Evolution as Fact and Theory", 1981)

"Moreover, ‘fact’ doesn’t mean ‘absolute certainty’; there ain’t no such animal in an exciting and complex world. The final proofs of logic and mathematics flow deductively from stated premises and achieve certainty only because they are NOT about the empirical world. Evolutionists make no claim for perpetual truth, though creationists often do (and then attack us falsely for a style of argument that they themselves favor)." (Stephen J Gould, "Evolution as Fact and Theory", Discover, 1981)

"The purpose of scientific enquiry is not to compile an inventory of factual information, nor to build up a totalitarian world picture of Natural Laws in which every event that is not compulsory is forbidden. We should think of it rather as a logically articulated structure of justifiable beliefs about nature. It begins as a story about a Possible World - a story which we invent and criticize and modify as we go along, so that it winds by being, as nearly as we can make it, a story about real life." (Sir Peter B Medawar, "Pluto’s Republic", 1982)

"In science 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent'." (Stephen J Gould, 1983) 

"[…] facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world’s data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them." (Stephen J Gould, "Hen’s Teeth and Horses Toes", 1983)

"In medical science arguments are going on between behaviorists who perceive the function of brain as a multitude of simple and unconscious conditioned reflexes, and cognitivists who insist that humans sensing the surrounding world create its mental image which can be considered as memory of facts." (Yevgeniy Chazov, "Tragedy and Triumph of Reason", 1985)

"All great theories are expansive, and all notions so rich in scope and implication are underpinned by visions about the nature of things. You may call these visions ‘philosophy’, or ‘metaphor’, or ‘organizing principle’, but one thing they are surely not - they are not simple inductions from observed facts of the natural world." (Stephen J Gould, "Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle", 1987)

"Although science literally means ‘knowledge’, the scientific attitude is concerned much more with rational perception through the mind and with testing such perceptions against actual fact, in the form of experiments and observations." (David Bohm & F David Peat, "Science, Order, and Creativity", 1987)

"Facts do not 'speak for themselves'. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theory or visions are mere isolated curiosities." (Thomas Sowell, "A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles", 1987)

"There is no coherent knowledge, i.e. no uniform comprehensive account of the world and the events in it. There is no comprehensive truth that goes beyond an enumeration of details, but there are many pieces of information, obtained in different ways from different sources and collected for the benefit of the curious. The best way of presenting such knowledge is the list - and the oldest scientific works were indeed lists of facts, parts, coincidences, problems in several specialized domains." (Paul K Feyerabend, "Farewell to Reason", 1987)

"[…] no good model ever accounted for all the facts, since some data was bound to be misleading if not plain wrong. A theory that did fit all the data would have been ‘carpentered’ to do this and would thus be open to suspicion." (Francis H C Crick, "What Mad Pursuit: A Personal View of Scientific Discovery", 1988)

"In the end, each life is no more than the sum of contingent facts, a chronicle of chance intersections, of ?ukes, of random events that divulge nothing but their own lack of purpose." (Paul Auster, "The Locked Room", 1988)

"The common perception of science as a rational activity, in which one confronts the evidence of fact with an open mind, could not be more false. Facts assume significance only within a pre-existing intellectual structure, which may be based as much on intuition and prejudice as on reason." (Walter Gratzer, The Guardian, 1989)

On Facts (1970-1979)

"Engineers, as a rule are not and do not pretend to be philosophers in the sense of building up consistent systems of thought following logically from certain premises. If anything, they pride themselves on being hard-headed practical men concerned only with facts, disdaining mere speculation or opinion. In practice, however, engineers do make many assumptions about the nature of the universe, of man, and of society." (Edwin T Layton Jr., "The Revolt of the Engineers", 1971)

"Early scientific thinking was holistic, but speculative - the modern scientific temper reacted by being empirical, but atomistic. Neither is free from error, the former because it replaces factual inquiry with faith and insight, and the latter because it sacrifices coherence at the altar of facticity. We witness today another shift in ways of thinking: the shift toward rigorous but holistic theories. This means thinking in terms of facts and events in the context of wholes, forming integrated sets with their own properties and relationships."(Ervin László, "Introduction to Systems Philosophy", 1972)

"There are two subcategories of holist called irredundant holists and redundant holists. Students of both types image an entire system of facts or principles. Though an irredundant holist's image is rightly interconnected, it contains only relevant and essential constitents. In contrast, redundant holists entertain images that contain logically irrelevant or overspecific material, commonly derived from data used to 'enrich' the curriculum, and these students embed the salient facts and principles in a network of redundant items. Though logically irrelevant, the items in question are of great psychological importance to a 'redundant holist', since he uses them to access, retain and manipulate whatever he was originally required to learn." (Gordon Pask, "Learning Strategies and Individual Competence", 1972)

"This parallel, between cybernetic explanation and the tactics of logical or mathematical proof, is of more than trivial interest. Outside of cybernetics, we look for explanation, but not for anything which would simulate logical proof. This simulation of proof is something new. We can say, however, with hindsight wisdom, that explanation by simulation of logical or mathematical proof was expectable. After all, the subject matter of cybernetics is not events and objects but the information 'carried' by events and objects. We consider the objects or events only as proposing facts, propositions, messages, percepts, and the like. The subject matter being propositional, it is expectable that explanation would simulate the logical." (Gregory Bateson, "Steps to an Ecology of Mind", 1972)

"To do science is to search for repeated patterns, not simply to accumulate facts, and to do the science of geographical ecology is to search for patterns of plants and animal life that can be put on a map." (Robert H. MacArthur, "Geographical Ecology", 1972)

"Models are not assigned per se uniquely to their originals. They perform their replacement function: a) for definite – cognitive and/or handling, model-using – subjects, b) within definite time intervals, c) under restrictions of definite operations of thought or fact. […] Models are not only models of something. They are also models for somebody, a human or an artificial model user. They perform thereby their functions in time, within a time interval. And finally, they are models for a definite purpose." (Herbert Stachowiak, "Allgemeine Modelltheorie", 1973)

"Is evolution a theory, a system or a hypothesis? It is much more: it is a general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must bow and which they must satisfy henceforth if they are to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light illuminating all facts, a curve that all lines must follow." (Pierre T de Chardin, "The Phenomenon of Man", 1975)

"No theory ever agrees with all the facts in its domain, yet it is not always the theory that is to blame. Facts are constituted by older ideologies, and a clash between facts and theories may be proof of progress. It is also a first step in our attempt to find the principles implicit in familiar observational notions." (Paul K Feyerabend, "Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge", 1975)

"[…] semantic nets [are defined] as graphical analogues of data structures representing 'facts' in a computer system for understanding natural language." (Lenhart K Schubert," "Extending the Expressive Power of Semantic Networks", Artificial Intelligence 7, 1976)

"In comparison with Predicate Calculus encoding is of factual knowledge, semantic nets seem more natural and understandable. This is due to the one-to-one correspondence between nodes and the concepts they denote, to the clustering about a particular node of propositions about a particular thing, and to the visual immediacy of 'interrelationships' between concepts, i.e., their connections via sequences of propositional links." (Lenhart K Schubert, "Extending the Expressive Power of Semantic Networks", Artificial Intelligence 7, 1976)

"The chief difficulty of modern theoretical physics resides not in the fact that it expresses itself almost exclusively in mathematical symbols, but in the psychological difficulty of supposing that complete nonsense can be seriously promulgated and transmitted by persons who have sufficient intelligence of some kind to perform operations in differential and integral calculus […]" (Celia Green, "The Decline and Fall of Science", 1976)

"Facts do not ‘speak for themselves’; they are read in the light of theory. Creative thought, in science as much as in the arts, is the motor of changing opinion. Science is a quintessentially human activity, not a mechanized, robot-like accumulation of objective information, leading by laws of logic to inescapable interpretation." (Stephen J Gould, "Ever Since Darwin", 1977)

"The branch of modern science called cybernetics gives us concepts that describe the evolutionary process at both the level of intracellular structures and the level of social phenomena. The fundamental unity of the evolutionary process at all levels of organization is transformed from a philosophical view to a scientifically substantiated fact." (Valentin F Turchin, "The Phenomenon of Science: A cybernetic approach to human evolution", 1977)

"There are two facts about the distribution of prime numbers of which I hope to convince you so overwhelmingly that they will be permanently engraved in your hearts. The first is that, despite their simple definition and role as the building blocks of the natural numbers, the prime numbers belong to the most arbitrary and ornery objects studied by mathematicians: they grow like weeds among the natural numbers, seeming to obey no other law than that of chance, and nobody can predict where the next one will sprout. The second fact is even more astonishing, for it states just the opposite: that the prime numbers exhibit stunning regularity, that there are laws governing their behaviour, and that they obey these laws with almost military precision." (Don Zagier, "The First 50 Million Prime Numbers", The Mathematical Intelligencer Vol. 0, 1977)

"A good theorem will almost always have a wide-ranging influence on later mathematics, simply by virtue of the fact that it is true. Since it is true, it must be true for some reason; and if that reason lies deep, then the uncovering of it will usually require a deeper understanding of neighboring facts and principles." (Ian Richards, "Number theory", 1978)

"No theory ever agrees with all the facts in its domain, yet it is not always the theory that is to blame. Facts are constituted by older ideologies, and a clash between facts and theories may be proof of progress." (Paul K Feyerabend, "Against Method", 1978)

"Science has so accustomed us to devising and accepting theories to account for the facts we observe, however fantastic, that our minds must begin their manufacture before we are aware of it." (Gene Wolfe, "Seven American Nights", 1978)

On Facts (1960-1969)

"For a certain domain of facts let no theory be known. If we replace our study of this domain by the study of another set of facts for which a theory is well known, and that has certain important characteristics in common with the field under investigation, then we use a model to develop our knowledge from a zero (or near zero) starting point." (Leo Apostel, "Towards the formal study of models in the non-formal sciences", Synthese, Vol. 12 (2-3), 1960)

"In fact, the construction of mathematical models for various fragments of the real world, which is the most essential business of the applied mathematician, is nothing but an exercise in axiomatics." (Marshall Stone, cca 1960)

"In fact, the construction of mathematical models for various fragments of the real world, which is the most essential business of the applied mathematician, is nothing but an exercise in axiomatics." (Marshall Stone, cca 1960)

"Random chance was not a sufficient explanation of the Universe - in fact, random chance was not sufficient to explain random chance; the pot could not hold itself." (Robert A Heinlein, "Stranger in a Strange Land", 1961)

"Science aims at the discovery, verification, and organization of fact and information [...] engineering is fundamentally committed to the translation of scientific facts and information to concrete machines, structures, materials, processes, and the like that can be used by men." (Eric A Walker, "Engineers and/or Scientists", Journal of Engineering Education Vol. 51, 1961)

"[Statistics] is concerned with things we can count. In so far as things, persons, are unique or ill-defi ned, statistics are meaningless and statisticians silenced; in so far as things are similar and definite - so many workers over 25, so many nuts and bolts made during December - they can be counted and new statistical facts are born." (Maurice S Bartlett, "Essays on Probability and Statistics", 1962)

"Can there be laws of chance? The answer, it would seem should be negative, since chance is in fact defined as the characteristic of the phenomena which follow no law, phenomena whose causes are too complex to permit prediction." (Félix E Borel, "Probabilities and Life", 1962)

"Just as the eye sees details that are not there if they fit in with the sense of the picture, or overlooks them if they make no sense, so also very little inherent certainty will suffice to secure the highest scientific value to an alleged fact, if only it fits in with a great scientific generalization, while the most stubborn facts will be set aside if there is no place for them in the established framework of science." (Michael Polanyi, "Personal Knowledge", 1962)

"One thinks one’s something unique and wonderful at the center of the universe. But in fact one’s merely a slight delay in the ongoing march of entropy." (Aldous Huxley, "Island", 1962)

"Science fiction is, very strictly and literally, analogous to science facts. It is a convenient analog system for thinking about new scientific, social, and economic ideas - and for re-examining old ideas." (John W Campbell Jr., "Prologue to Analog", 1962)

"The important distinction between science and those other systematizations [i.e., art, philosophy, and theology] is that science is self-testing and self-correcting. Here the essential point of science is respect for objective fact. What is correctly observed must be believed [...] the competent scientist does quite the opposite of the popular stereotype of setting out to prove a theory; he seeks to disprove it." (George G Simpson, "Notes on the Nature of Science", 1962)

"We must now ask how changes of this sort can come about, considering first discoveries, or novelties of fact, and then inventions, or novelties of theory. That distinction between discovery and invention or between fact and theory will, however, immediately prove to be exceedingly artificial." (Thomas Kuhn, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", 1962)

"If our model is to be at all realistic, it will also need to be rather complex, It will in fact be too complex for easy handling by the traditional analytic measures, even after suitable simplifications." (Charles P Bonini, "Simulation of Information and Decision System in the Firm" , 1963)

"The view is often defended that sciences should be built up on clear and sharply defined basal concepts. In actual fact no science, not even the most exact, begins with such definitions. The true beginning of scientific activity consists rather in describing phenomena and then in proceeding to group, classify and correlate them." (Sigmund Freud, "General Psychological Theory", 1963)

"Celestial navigation is based on the premise that the Earth is the center of the universe. The premise is wrong, but the navigation works. An incorrect model can be a useful tool." (R A J Phillips, "A Day in the Life of Kelvin Throop", Analog Science Fiction and Science Fact, Vol. 73 No. 5, 1964)

"Each piece, or part, of the whole of nature is always merely an approximation to the complete truth, or the complete truth so far as we know it. In fact, everything we know is only some kind of approximation, because we know that we do not know all the laws as yet. Therefore, things must be learned only to be unlearned again or, more likely, to be corrected." (Richard Feynman, "The Feynman Lectures on Physics" Vol. 1,1964)

"Engineering is a method and a philosophy for coping with that which is uncertain at the earliest possible moment and to the ultimate service to mankind. It is not a science struggling for a place in the sun. Engineering is extrapolation from existing knowledge rather than interpolation between known points. Because engineering is science in action - the practice of decision making at the earliest moment - it has been defined as the art of skillful approximation. No situation in engineering is simple enough to be solved precisely, and none worth evaluating is solved exactly. Never are there sufficient facts, sufficient time, or sufficient money for an exact solution, for if by chance there were, the answer would be of academic and not economic interest to society. These are the circumstances that make engineering so vital and so creative." (Ronald B Smith, "Engineering Is…", Mechanical Engineering Vol. 86 (5), 1964)

"Engineering is the art of skillful approximation; the practice of gamesmanship in the highest form. In the end it is a method broad enough to tame the unknown, a means of combing disciplined judgment with intuition, courage with responsibility, and scientific competence within the practical aspects of time, of cost, and of talent. This is the exciting view of modern-day engineering that a vigorous profession can insist be the theme for education and training of its youth. It is an outlook that generates its strength and its grandeur not in the discovery of facts but in their application; not in receiving, but in giving. It is an outlook that requires many tools of science and the ability to manipulate them intelligently In the end, it is a welding of theory and practice to build an early, strong, and useful result. Except as a valuable discipline of the mind, a formal education in technology is sterile until it is applied." (Ronald B Smith, "Professional Responsibility of Engineering", Mechanical Engineering Vol. 86 (1), 1964)

"It is not impossible that our own Model will die a violent death, ruthlessly smashed by an unprovoked assault of new facts […]. (Clive S Lewis, "The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature", 1964)

"The moment of truth, the sudden emergence of a new insight, is an act of intuition. Such intuitions give the appearance of miraculous flushes, or short-circuits of reasoning. In fact they may be likened to an immersed chain, of which only the beginning and the end are visible above the surface of consciousness. The diver vanishes at one end of the chain and comes up at the other end, guided by invisible links. (Arthur Koestler, "The Act of Creation", 1964)

"There are metaphysical problems, which cannot be disposed of by declaring them meaningless. For, as I have repeatedly said, they are ‘beyond physics’ indeed and demand an act of faith. We have to accept this fact to be honest. There are two objectionable types of believers: those who believe the incredible and those who believe that ‘belief’ must be discarded and replaced by 'the scientific method'." (Max Born, "Natural Philosophy of Cause and Chance", 1964)

"A model is a qualitative or quantitative representation of a process or endeavor that shows the effects of those factors which are significant for the purposes being considered. A model may be pictorial, descriptive, qualitative, or generally approximate in nature; or it may be mathematical and quantitative in nature and reasonably precise. It is important that effective means for modeling be understood such as analog, stochastic, procedural, scheduling, flow chart, schematic, and block diagrams." (Harold Chestnut, "Systems Engineering Tools", 1965)

"Every rule has its limits, and every concept its ambiguities. Most of all is this true in the science of life, where nothing quite corresponds to our ideas; similar ends are reached by varied means, and no causes are simple." (Lancelot L Whyte, "Internal Factors in Evolution", 1965)

"One of the chief motivations behind the attempt to defend a distinction between theoretical and observational terms has been the desire to explain how a theory can be tested against the data of experience, and how one theory can be said to ‘account for the facts’ better than another; that is, to give a precise characterization of the idea, almost universally accepted in modern times, that the sciences are ‘based on experience’, that they are ‘empirical’." (Dudley Shapere, "Philosophical Problems of Natural Science", 1965)

"Systems engineering is most effectively conceived of as a process that starts with the detection of a problem and continues through problem definition, planning and designing of a system, manufacturing or other implementing section, its use, and finally on to its obsolescence. Further, Systems engineering is not a matter of tools alone; It is a careful coordination of process, tools and people." (Arthur D. Hall, "Systems Engineering from an Engineering Viewpoint" In: Systems Science and Cybernetics. Vol.1 Issue.1, 1965)

"The subject matter of the scientist is a crowd of natural events at all times; he presupposes that this crowd is not real but apparent, and seeks to discover the true place of events in the system of nature. The subject matter of the poet is a crowd of historical occasions of feeling recollected from the past; he presupposes that this crowd is real but should not be, and seeks to transform it into a community. Both science and art are primarily spiritual activities, whatever practical applications may be derived from their results. Disorder, lack of meaning, are spiritual not physical discomforts, order and sense spiritual not physical satisfactions." (Wystan H Auden, "The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays", 1965)

"A model is a useful (and often indispensable) framework on which to organize our knowledge about a phenomenon. […] It must not be overlooked that the quantitative consequences of any model can be no more reliable than the a priori agreement between the assumptions of the model and the known facts about the real phenomenon. When the model is known to diverge significantly from the facts, it is self-deceiving to claim quantitative usefulness for it by appeal to agreement between a prediction of the model and observation." (John R Philip, 1966)

"Specific procedures of universe-maintenance become necessary when the symbolic universe has become a problem. As long as this is not the case, the symbolic universe is self-maintaining, that is, self-legitimating by the sheer facticity of its objective existence in the society in question." (Peter L Berger, "The Social Construction of Reality", 1966)

"The real difficulty lies in the fact that only a finite number of angels can dance on the head of a pin, whereas the mathematician is more apt to be interested in the infinite angel problem only." (Henri Lebesgue, "Mechanized Mathematics", Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society Vol. 72 (5), 1966)

"What indeed is mathematics? This question, if asked in earnest, has no answer, not a satisfactory one; only part answers and observations can be attempted." (Salomon Bochner, "The Role of Mathematics in the Rise of Science", 1966)

"It seems to me now that mathematics is capable of an artistic excellence as great as that of any music, perhaps greater; not because the pleasure it gives (although very pure) is comparable, either in intensity or in the number of people who feel it, to that of music, but because it gives in absolute perfection that combination, characteristic of great art, of godlike freedom, with the sense of inevitable destiny; because, in fact, it constructs an ideal world where everything is perfect and yet true." (Bertrand Russell, "Autobiography", 1967)

"The fact is that there are few more ‘popular’ subjects than mathematics. Most people have some appreciation of mathematics, just as most people can enjoy a pleasant tune; and there are probably more people really interested in mathematics than in music. Appearances may suggest the contrary, but there are easy explanations. Music can be used to stimulate mass emotion, while mathematics cannot; and musical incapacity is recognized (no doubt rightly) as mildly discreditable [...]" (Godfrey H Hardy, "A Mathematician’s Apology", 1967)

"The question of the origin of life is essentially speculative. We have to construct, by straightforward thinking on the basis of very few factual observations, a plausible and self-consistent picture of a process which must have occurred before any of the forms which are known to us in the fossil record could have existed." (John D Bernal, "The Origin of Life", 1967)

"I suspect that even if the random walkers announced a perfect mathematic proof of randomness I would go on believing that in the long run future earnings influence present value, and that in the short run the dominant factor is the elusive Australopithecus, the temper of the crowd." (Adam Smith, "The Money Game", 1968)

"Now we are looking for another basic outlook on the world - the world as organization. Such a conception - if it can be substantiated - would indeed change the basic categories upon which scientific thought rests, and profoundly influence practical attitudes. This trend is marked by the emergence of a bundle of new disciplines such as cybernetics, information theory, general system theory, theories of games, of decisions, of queuing and others; in practical applications, systems analysis, systems engineering, operations research, etc. They are different in basic assumptions, mathematical techniques and aims, and they are often unsatisfactory and sometimes contradictory. They agree, however, in being concerned, in one way or another, with ‘systems’, ‘wholes’ or ‘organizations’; and in their totality, they herald a new approach." (Ludwig von Bertalanffy, "General System Theory", 1968)

"Scientific knowledge is not created solely by the piecemeal mining of discrete facts by uniformly accurate and reliable individual scientific investigations. The process of criticism and evaluation, of analysis and synthesis, are essential to the whole system. It is impossible for each one of us to be continually aware of all that is going on around us, so that we can immediately decide the significance of every new paper that is published. The job of making such judgments must therefore be delegated to the best and wisest among us, who speak, not with their own personal voices, but on behalf of the whole community of Science. […] It is impossible for the consensus - public knowledge - to be voiced at all, unless it is channeled through the minds of selected persons, and restated in their words for all to hear." (John M Ziman, "Public Knowledge: An Essay Concerning the Social Dimension of Science", 1968)

"Teaching is more difficult than learning because what teaching calls for is this: to let learn. The real teacher, in fact, let nothing else be learned than learning. His conduct, therefore, often produces the impression that we properly learn nothing from him, if by ‘learning’ we now suddenly understand merely the procurement of useful information." (Martin Heidegger, "What is called thinking?", 1968)

"The fundamental problem today is that of organized complexity. Concepts like those of organization, wholeness, directiveness, teleology, and differentiation are alien to conventional physics. However, they pop up everywhere in the biological, behavioral and social sciences, and are, in fact, indispensable for dealing with living organisms or social groups. Thus a basic problem posed to modern science is a general theory of organization. General system theory is, in principle, capable of giving exact definitions for such concepts and, in suitable cases, of putting them to quantitative analysis." (Ludwig von Bertalanffy, "General System Theory", 1968)

"The parallelism of general conceptions or even special laws in different fields therefore is a consequence of the fact that these are concerned with 'systems' and that certain general principles apply to systems irrespective of their nature. Hence principles such as those of wholeness and sum, mechanization, hierarchic order, approached to steady states, equifinality, etc., may appear in quite different disciplines. The isomorphism found in different realms is based of the existence of general system principles, of a more or less well-developed ‘general system theory’." (Ludwig von Bertalanffy, "General System Theory", 1968)

"These machines have no common sense; they have not yet learned to 'think', and they do exactly as they are told, no more and no less. This fact is the hardest concept to grasp when one first tries to use a computer." (Donald Knuth, "The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 1: Fundamental Algorithms", 1968)

"As to the role of emotions in art and the subconscious mechanism that serves as the integrating factor both in artistic creation and in man's response to art, they involve a psychological phenomenon which we call a sense of life. A sense of life is a pre-conceptual equivalent of metaphysics, an emotional, subconsciously integrated appraisal of man and of existence." (Ayn Rand, "The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature", 1969)

"In complex systems cause and effect are often not closely related in either time or space. The structure of a complex system is not a simple feedback loop where one system state dominates the behavior. The complex system has a multiplicity of interacting feedback loops. Its internal rates of flow are controlled by nonlinear relationships. The complex system is of high order, meaning that there are many system states (or levels). It usually contains positive-feedback loops describing growth processes as well as negative, goal-seeking loops. In the complex system the cause of a difficulty may lie far back in time from the symptoms, or in a completely different and remote part of the system. In fact, causes are usually found, not in prior events, but in the structure and policies of the system." (Jay Wright Forrester, "Urban dynamics", 1969)

"My analysis of living systems uses concepts of thermodynamics, information theory, cybernetics, and systems engineering, as well as the classical concepts appropriate to each level. The purpose is to produce a description of living structure and process in terms of input and output, flows through systems, steady states, and feedbacks, which will clarify and unify the facts of life." (James G Miller, "Living Systems: Basic Concepts", 1969)

"The laws of nature 'discovered' by science are merely mathematical or mechanical models that describe how nature behaves, not why, nor what nature 'actually' is. Science strives to find representations that accurately describe nature, not absolute truths. This fact distinguishes science from religion." (George O Abell, "Exploration of the Universe", 1969)

On Facts (1950-1959)

"Whoever thinks algebra is a trick in obtaining unknowns has thought it in vain. No attention should be paid to the fact that algebra and geometry are different in appearance. Algebras are geometric facts which are proved." (Omar Khayyam [quoted by J.J. Winter and W. Arafat, "The Algebra of ‘Umar Khayyam’", Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, Volume 41, 1950)

"A conceptual scheme is never discarded merely because of a few stubborn facts with which it cannot be reconciled; a conceptual scheme is either modified or replaced by a better one, never abandoned with nothing left to take its place." (James B Conant, "Science and Common Sense", 1951)

"The act of discovery escapes logical analysis; there are no logical rules in terms of which a 'discovery machine' could be constructed that would take over the creative function of the genius. But it is not the logician’s task to account for scientific discoveries; all he can do is to analyze the relation between given facts and a theory presented to him with the claim that it explains these facts. In other words, logic is concerned with the context of justification." (Hans Reichenbach, "The Rise of Scientific Philosophy", 1951)

"The scientist who discovers a theory is usually guided to his discovery by guesses; he cannot name a method by means of which he found the theory and can only say that it appeared plausible to him, that he had the right hunch or that he saw intuitively which assumption would fit the facts." (Hans Reichenbach, "The Rise of Scientific Philosophy", 1951)

"The study of inductive inference belongs to the theory of probability, since observational facts can make a theory only probable but will never make it absolutely certain." (Hans Reichenbach, "The Rise of Scientific Philosophy", 1951)

"Without facts we have no science. Facts are to the scientist what words are to the poet. The scientist has a love of facts, even isolated facts, similar to a poet’s love of words. But a collection of facts is not a science any more than a dictionary is poetry. Around his facts the scientist weaves a logical pattern or theory which gives the facts meaning, order and significance." (Isidor Isaac Rabi, "Faith in Science", Atlantic Monthly , Vol. 187, 1951)

"In topology we are concerned with geometrical facts that do not even involve the concepts of a straight line or plane but only the continuous connectiveness between points of a figure." (David Hilbert, "Geometry and Imagination", 1952)

"The world is not made up of empirical facts with the addition of the laws of nature: what we call the laws of nature are conceptual devices by which we organize our empirical knowledge and predict the future." (Richard B Braithwaite, "Scientific Explanation", 1953)

"We cannot define truth in science until we move from fact to law. And within the body of laws in turn, what impresses us as truth is the orderly coherence of the pieces. They fit together like the characters of a great novel, or like the words of a poem. Indeed, we should keep that last analogy by us always, for science is a language, and like a language it defines its parts by the way they make up a meaning. Every word in a sentence has some uncertainty of definition, and yet the sentence defines its own meaning and that of its words conclusively. It is the internal unity and coherence of science which gives it truth, and which makes it a better system of prediction than any less orderly language." (Jacob Bronowski, "The Common Sense of Science", 1953)

"[…] the grand aim of all science […] is to cover the greatest possible number of empirical facts by logical deductions from the smallest possible number of hypotheses or axioms." (Albert Einstein, 1954)

"[…] the scientific picture of the real world around me is very deficient. It gives a lot of factual information, puts all our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but it is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart, that really matters to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity. Science sometimes pretends to answer questions in these domains, but the answers are very often so silly that we are not inclined to take them seriously." (Erwin Schrödinger, "Nature and the Greeks", 1954)

"It is indeed wrong to think that the poetry of Nature’s moods in all their infinite variety is lost on one who observes them scientifically, for the habit of observation refines our sense of beauty and adds a brighter hue to the richly coloured background against which each separate fact is outlined. The connection between events, the relation of cause and effect in different parts of a landscape, unite harmoniously what would otherwise be merely a series of detached sciences." (Marcel Minnaert, "The Nature of Light and Colour in the Open Air", 1954)

"Science does not begin with facts; one of its tasks is to uncover the facts by removing misconceptions." (Lancelot L Whyte, "Accent on Form", 1954)

"The theory of relativity is a fine example of the fundamental character of the modern development of theoretical science. The initial hypotheses become steadily more abstract and remote from experience. On the other hand, it gets nearer to the grand aim of all science, which is to cover the greatest possible number of empirical facts by logical deduction from the smallest possible number of hypotheses or axioms." (Albert Einstein, 1954)

"The true aim of science is to discover a simple theory which is necessary and sufficient to cover the facts, when they have been purified of traditional prejudices." (Lancelot L Whyte, "Accent on Form", 1954)

"Science is the creation of concepts and their exploration in the facts. It has no other test of the concept than its empirical truth to fact." (Jacob Bronowski, "Science and Human Values", 1956)

"Is it possible to breach this wall, to present mathematics in such a way that the spectator may enjoy it? Cannot the enjoyment of mathematics be extended beyond the small circle of those who are ‘mathematically gifted’? Indeed, only a few are mathematically gifted in the sense that they are endowed with the talent to discover new mathematical facts. But by the same token, only very few are musically gifted in that they are able to compose music. Nevertheless, there are many who can understand and perhaps reproduce music, or who at least enjoy it. We believe that the number of people who can understand simple mathematical ideas is not relatively smaller than the number of those who are commonly called musical, and that their interest will be stimulated if only we can eliminate the aversion toward mathematics that so many have acquired from childhood experiences." (Hans Rademacher & Otto Toeplitz, "The Enjoyment of Mathematics", 1957)

"When we meet a fact which contradicts a prevailing theory, we must accept the fact and abandon the theory, even when the theory is supported by great names and generally accepted." (Claude Bernard, "An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine", 1957)

"Chaos is but unperceived order; it is a word indicating the limitations of the human mind and the paucity of observational facts. The words ‘chaos’, ‘accidental’, ‘chance’, ‘unpredictable’ are conveniences behind which we hide our ignorance." (Harlow Shapley, "Of Stars and Men: Human Response to an Expanding Universe", 1958)

"If we have been slow to develop the general concepts of ecology and conservation, we have been even more tardy in recognizing the facts of the ecology and conservation of man himself. We may hope that this will be the next major phase in the development of biology. Here and there awareness is growing that man, far from being the overlord of all creation, is himself part of nature, subject to the same cosmic forces that control all other life. Man's future welfare and probably even his survival depend upon his learning to live in harmony, rather than in combat, with these forces. (Rachel Carson, "Essay on the Biological Sciences" in Good Reading, 1958)

On Facts (1940-1949)

"[…] there is probably less difference between the positions of a mathematician and of a physicist than is generally supposed, [...] the mathematician is in much more direct contact with reality. This may seem a paradox, since it is the physicist who deals with the subject-matter usually described as 'real', but [...] [a physicist] is trying to correlate the incoherent body of crude fact confronting him with some definite and orderly scheme of abstract relations, the kind of scheme he can borrow only from mathematics." (Godfrey H Hardy, "A Mathematician's Apology", 1940)

"What the diagram has in common with the symbolic schema is the fact that the diagram spatially represents an abstract and unextended object. But there is here nothing other than a determinate location in space. This location serves as a mooring, an attachment, an orientation for our memory, but does not play any role in our thought." (Jean-Paul Sartre, "The Imaginary: A phenomenological psychology of the imagination", 1940)

"Mathematicians deal with possible worlds, with an infinite number of logically consistent systems. Observers explore the one particular world we inhabit. Between the two stands the theorist. He studies possible worlds but only those which are compatible with the information furnished by observers. In other words, theory attempts to segregate the minimum number of possible worlds which must include the actual world we inhabit. Then the observer, with new factual information, attempts to reduce the list further. And so it goes, observation and theory advancing together toward the common goal of science, knowledge of the structure and observation of the universe." (Edwin P Hubble, "The Problem of the Expanding Universe", 1941)

"Different kinds of facts, having different degrees of scientific value, are ascertainable in these two ways. Facts ascertainable by mere observation are what are called common-sense facts, i.e. facts accessible to a commonplace mind on occasions frequent enough to be rather often perceived and of such a kind that their characteristics can be adequately perceived without trouble: so that the facts concerning them can be familiar to persons not especially gifted and not especially alert." (Robin G Collingwood, "The New Leviathan: Or Man, Society, Civilization and Barbarism", 1942)

"The atomic theory plays a part in physics similar to that of certain auxiliary concepts in mathematics: it is a mathematical model for facilitating the mental reproduction of facts." (Ernst Mach, "The Science of Mechanics" 5th Ed, 1942)

"The faith of scientists in the power of mathematics is so implicit that their work has gradually become less and less observation, and more and more calculation. The promiscuous collection and tabulation of data have given way to a process of assigning possible meanings, merely supposed real entities, to mathematical terms, working out the logical results, and then staging certain crucial experiments to check the hypothesis against the actual, empirical results. But the facts [...] accepted by virtue of these tests are not actually observed at all." (Susanne K Langer, "Philosophy in a New Key", 1942)

"A material model is the representation of a complex system by a system which is assumed simpler and which is also assumed to have some properties similar to those selected for study in the original complex system. A formal model is a symbolic assertion in logical terms of an idealised relatively simple situation sharing the structural properties of the original factual system." (Arturo Rosenblueth & Norbert Wiener, "The Role of Models in Science", Philosophy of Science Vol. 12 (4), 1945)

"Every time one combines and records facts in accordance with established logical processes, the creative aspect of thinking is concerned only with the selection of the data and the process to be employed, and the manipulation thereafter is repetitive in nature and hence a fit matter to be relegated to the machines." (Vannevar Bush, "As We May Think", 1945)

"We can put it down as one of the principles learned from the history of science that a theory is only overthrown by a better theory, never merely by contradictory facts." (James B Conant, "On Understanding Science", 1947)

"A man desiring to understand the world looks about for a clue to its comprehension. He pitches upon some area of commonsense fact and tries to understand other areas in terms of this one. The original area becomes his basic analogy or root metaphor." (Stephen Pepper, "World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence", 1948)

"To some people, statistics is ‘quartered pies, cute little battleships and tapering rows of sturdy soldiers in diversified uniforms’. To others, it is columns and columns of numerical facts. Many regard it as a branch of economics. The beginning student of the subject considers it to be largely mathematics." (The Editors, "Statistics, The Physical Sciences and Engineering", The American Statistician, Vol. 2, No. 4, 1948)

"[…] science, properly interpreted, is not dependent on any sort of metaphysics. It merely attempts to cover a maximum of facts by a minimum of laws." (Herbert Feigl, "Naturalism and Humanism", American Quarterly, Vol. 1, No. 2, 1949)

"Facts are the raw material of science - the bricks from which our model of the universe must be built - and we are rightly taught to search for sound and solid facts, for strong and heavy bricks that will serve us well in building foundations, for clean and polished bricks that will fi t neatly into ornamental towers. But while accumulating the bricks may be a contribution to science, we must take care that the pile does not become a hopelessly discouraging jumble. For science itself is not brickmaking - it is, at the workaday and technical level, bricklaying; and at the creative and artistic level, architecture, the designing of an edifice that will utilize all the bricks to the very best of advantage." (Marston Bates, "The Natural History of Mosquitoes", 1949)

"However obvious these facts may appear at first glance, they are actually not so obvious as they seem except when we take special pains to think about the subject. Symbols and things symbolized are independent of each other; nevertheless, we all have a way of feeling as if […] there were necessary connections." (Samuel I Hayakawa, "Language in Thought and Action", 1949)