William of Ockham

Martinez FD. 2007. Gene-environment interaction in asthma With apologies t William of Ockham. Proc Am Thorac Soc. 4 26-31. 

Quite. As I was saying, to a Turkish agent the poison would be an unnecessary complication. An ambush in a dark doorway would be far more effective. So you see, Your Excellency— now the Maestro carefully addressed the inquisitor —although the official theory cannot be absolutely disproved, it requires a lot of unlikely suppositions.Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate, as the saintly Brother William of Ockham taught us. ... 

William of Ockham, 141 1 century A1 Sherman, who introduced me to quantum mechanics while I was an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, was co-author with Van Vleck of a classic paper on quantum chemistry which contained the following significant statement ... 

Principle of parsimony (Occam s Razor William of Ockham, 1285-1349/ 1350, English philosopher and logician). All things being (approximately) equal, one should accept the simplest model. 

The assumptions that Che unit cell possesses the symmetry of space group 2 and that the twofold axis is coincident with the chain axis, do in fact meet a criterion long honored in scientific studies, namely, William of Ockham s principle of economy, which requires that the most simple hypothesis consistent with observations should always be adopted. Clearly the structure based on the anhydroglucose as the repeat unit is the most simple structure that accounts for the majority of the diffractometric data. Furthermore, the diffractometric data available are not sufficient to allow refinement of a structure possessing many more degrees of freedom, as would be the case if the twofold axis were not assumed coincident with the chain axis. 

William of Ockham A Short Discourse on Tyrannical Government (edited by A. S. McGrade and John Kilcullen)... 

The principle of Ockham s Razor is attributed to William of Ockham (c. 1285—c. 1349), an English Franciscan friar. He is credited with the concept of Ockham s razor, which states that, simpler explanations are, other things being equal, generally better than more complex ones. ... 

However, the point has not yet been taken. For example Nei et al. (1998) used computer simulation to compare various methods, one of which, parsimony, they still claim has as its theoretical basis William of Ockham s philosophical idea. ... 

Named for the philosopher William of Ockham (1285-1349 he died during the bubonic plague), who put it better What can be done with fewer is done in vain with more. ... 

For nearly 700 years, the words of William of Ockham, a medieval philosopher, have been cited Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity . However, to solve the old... 

The poster boy for the Newtonian Revolution was the principle of parsimony as articulated by Aristotle, that nature operates in the shortest way possible and the more limited, if adequate, is always preferable . The principle is also linked with the English philosopher and Franciscan monk William of Ockham, who advocated what is known as Ockham s Razor pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate ( plurality should not be posited without necessity ) and "non sunt multiplicanda entia praeter necessitatetri ( entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily ). In this sense, the principle of simplicity obliges us to favour theories or hypotheses that make the fewest unwarranted, or ad hoc, assumptions about the data from which they are derived. This epistemological use of the principle does not necessarily imply that nature itself is parsimonious. Nonetheless, most scientists even today follow Newton and conduct their research as if they believe that nature is parsimonious in some sense, and they place much more credence in simple than in complex theories. 

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