On Literature: On Hypotheses (From Fiction to Science-Fiction)

"Phenomena may well be suspected of anything, are capable of anything. Hypothesis proclaims the infinite; that is what gives hypothesis its greatness. Beneath the surface fact it seeks the real fact. It asks creation for her thoughts, and then for her second thoughts. The great scientific discoverers are those who hold nature suspect." (Victor Hugo, "The Toilers of the Sea", 1866)

"An hypothesis is only a habit - a habit of looking through a glass of one peculiar colour, which imparts its hue to all around it." (Frederick Marryat, "The King's Own", 1873) 

"If the fresh facts which come to our knowledge all fit themselves into the scheme, then our hypothesis may gradually become a solution." (Arthur C Doyle, "The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge", 1908)

"More often than not, nothingness is reluctantly and despairingly taken to be the only hypothesis possible when all the others have failed, since by definition it cannot be disproven and is beyond the scope of reason." (Georges Bernanos, "L'imposture" ["The Impostor"], 1927)

"At the final stage you teach me that this wondrous and multicolored universe can be reduced to the atom and that the atom itself can be reduced to the electron. All this is good and I wait for you to continue. But you tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons gravitate around a nucleus. You explain this world to me with an image. I realize then that you have been reduced to poetry: I shall never know. Have I the time to become indignant? You have already changed theories. So that science that was to teach me everything ends up in a hypothesis, that lucidity founders in metaphor, that uncertainty is resolved in a work of art." (Albert Camus, "The Myth of Sisyphus", 1942)

"Science fiction is that class of prose narrative treating of a situation that could not arise in the world we know, but which is hypothesised on the basis of some innovation in science or technology, or pseudo-science or pseudo-technology, whether human or extra-terrestrial in origin." (Kingsley Amis, "New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction", 1960) 

"To the paranoid, nothing is a surprise; everything happens exactly as he expected, and sometimes even more so. It all fits into his system. For us, though, there can be no system; maybe all systems - that is, any theoretical, verbal, symbolic, semantic, etc. formulation that attempts to act as an all-encompassing, all-explaining hypothesis of what the universe is about - are manifestations of paranoia. We should be content with the mysterious, the meaningless, the contradictory, the hostile, and most of all the unexplainably warm and giving." (Philip K Dick, "The Android and the Human", [speech] 1972)

"A hypothesis may be simply defined as a guess. A scientific hypothesis is an intelligent guess." (Isaac Asimov, "Isaac Asimov’s Book of Science and Nature Quotations", 1988)

"It does take great maturity to understand that the opinion we are arguing for is merely the hypothesis we favor, necessarily imperfect, probably transitory, which only very limited minds can declare to be a certainty or a truth." (Milan Kundera, "Encounter", 2009)