One of the most fertile and original men I have ever known. ... He was a rare combiantion, almost unique, of a theoretical physicist and a thoroughly practical engineer.
--
Fred Terman describing William Hansen, as quoted by C. Stewart Gillmor (2004). Fred Terman at Stanford: building a discipline, a university, and Silicon Valley. Stanford University Press. p. 282. ISBN 0804749140.W. W. Hansen
It is easy to see that this problem can be solved neither in theoretical nor in practical philosophy, but only in a higher discipline, which is the link that combines them, and neither theoretical nor practical, but both at once.
Friedrich Schelling
Therefore psychologically we must keep all the theories in our heads, and every theoretical physicist who is any good knows six or seven different theoretical representations for exactly the same physics.
Richard Feynman
The most important tool of the theoretical physicist is his wastebasket.
Albert Einstein
It has often been said, and certainly not without justification, that the man of science is a poor philosopher. Why then should it not be the right thing for the physicist to let the philosopher do the philosophizing? Such might indeed be the right thing to do a time when the physicist believes he has at his disposal a rigid system of fundamental laws which are so well established that waves of doubt can't reach them; but it cannot be right at a time when the very foundations of physics itself have become problematic as they are now. At a time like the present, when experience forces us to seek a newer and more solid foundation, the physicist cannot simply surrender to the philosopher the critical contemplation of theoretical foundations; for he himself knows best and feels more surely where the shoe pinches. In looking for an new foundation, he must try to make clear in his own mind just how far the concepts which he uses are justified, and are necessities.
Albert Einstein
The fear of speculation, the ostensible rush from the theoretical to the practical, brings about the same shallowness in action that it does in knowledge. It is by studying a strictly theoretical philosophy that we become most acquainted with Ideas, and only Ideas provide action with energy and ethical significance.
Friedrich Schelling
Hansen, W. W.
Hanslick, Eduard
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