A Quote by Dimitar Sasselov

Deep and elegant explanations relate to natural or social phenomena and the observer often has no place in them.

Dimitar Sasselov

Quote Topics

Deep Elegant Explanations Natural Observer Often Phenomena Place Relate Social Them

Quote Author

Dimitar Sasselov
Bulgarian - Scientist
Born: 1961

Anyone who has ever stopped to watch a hawk in flight will know that this is one of the natural world's most elegant phenomena.

John Burnside

Science is not a thing. It's a verb. It's a way of thinking about things. It's a way of looking for natural explanations for all phenomena.

Michael Shermer

If we suppose that many natural phenomena are in effect computations, the study of computer science can tell us about the kinds of natural phenomena that can occur.

Rudy Rucker

Hopefully we are emerging from an era of fantasy explanations for real phenomena. The authors certainly have to face a community of therapists who are obsessionally committed to explanations for disease and for therapy unsupported by a scrap of evidence except for their claimed therapeutic success.

Patrick David Wall

If you look at the history of unexplained phenomena that was first explained by spiritual, mystical forces, the track record is not very good for the mystical, magical explanations to survive against more quote "mundane" physical explanations.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

The relevant features of scientific practice often have mundane explanations which don't point to any deep metaphysical moral. (Thus it would simply be messy and pointless for the chemists to essay physical reductions, or for the biologists to offer number-free explanations. It's a weird kind of science-worship that views these practical considerations as clues to the nature of reality.)

David Papineau

Grace is in a great measure a natural gift; elegance implies cultivation; or something of more artificial character. A rustic, uneducated girl may be graceful, but an elegant woman must be accomplished and well trained. It is the same with things as with persons; we talk of a graceful tree, but of an elegant house or other building. Animals may be graceful, but they cannot be elegant. The movements of a kitten or a young fawn are full of grace; but to call them "elegant" animals would be absurd.

Richard Whately

The Scientific Revolution, that remarkable transformation of European thought that occurred between approximately 1550 and 1700, brought with it an ascendancy of the experimental method and the refusal to believe any explanation of natural phenomena that could not be proven to the satisfaction of the empirical observer.

Sherwin B. Nuland

The teacher must derive not only the capacity, but the desire, to observe natural phenomena. The teacher must understand and feel her position of observer: the activity must lie in the phenomenon.

Maria Montessori

Our design, not respecting arts, but philosophy, and our subject, not manual, but natural powers, we consider chiefly those things which relate to gravity, levity, elastic force, the resistance of fluids, and the like forces, whether attractive or impulsive; and therefore we offer this work as mathematical principles of philosophy; for all the difficulty of philosophy seems to consist in this from the phenomena of motions to investigate the forces of nature, and then from these forces to demonstrate the other phenomena.

Isaac Newton

Westerners think that all that is negative and positive is only caused from outside of themselves. They materialize and externalize their experiences, never understanding the connection between outer and inner phenomena or interdependent phenomena, looking for explanations only from objects through nihilist habit instead of from the subjective experience of their own minds.

Thinley Norbu

Social situations, for me - it's very natural for me to be an observer. That's where I'm most comfortable. I observe things.

Ray LaMontagne

Science is beautiful when it makes simple explanations of phenomena or connections between different observations.

Stephen Hawking

When you relate to thoughts obsessively, you are actually feeding them because thoughts need your attention to survive. Once you begin to pay attention to them and categorize them, then they become very powerful. You are feeding them energy because you are not seeing them as simple phenomena. If one tries to quiet them down, that is another way of feeding them.