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50-623: Ulrich Schöllkopf (11 October 1927 – 6 November 1998) was a German chemist and together with Georg Wittig discovered the Wittig reaction in 1956. Later in 1981 he published the synthesis method for amino acids known as the Bislactimether method or Schöllkopf method . Schöllkopf studied with Georg Wittig at the University of Tübingen where he received his PhD with work on the Wittig reaction in 1956 and received his habilitation at

100-721: A hypothesis . If a new theory better explains and predicts a phenomenon than an old theory (i.e., it has more explanatory power ), we are justified in believing that the newer theory describes reality more correctly. This is called an intertheoretic reduction because the terms of the old theory can be reduced to the terms of the new one. For instance, our historical understanding about sound , light and heat have been reduced to wave compressions and rarefactions , electromagnetic waves , and molecular kinetic energy , respectively. These terms, which are identified with each other, are called intertheoretic identities. When an old and new theory are parallel in this way, we can conclude that

150-518: A knowledge transfer where there is a task of translating research knowledge to be application in practice, and ensuring that practitioners are made aware of it. Academics have been criticized for not attempting to transfer the knowledge they produce to practitioners. Another framing supposes that theory and knowledge seek to understand different problems and model the world in different words (using different ontologies and epistemologies ). Another framing says that research does not produce theory that

200-419: A first step toward being tested or applied in a concrete situation; theorems are said to be true in the sense that the conclusions of a theorem are logical consequences of the axioms. Theories are abstract and conceptual, and are supported or challenged by observations in the world. They are ' rigorously tentative', meaning that they are proposed as true and expected to satisfy careful examination to account for

250-413: A foundation to gain further scientific knowledge, as well as to accomplish goals such as inventing technology or curing diseases. The United States National Academy of Sciences defines scientific theories as follows: The formal scientific definition of "theory" is quite different from the everyday meaning of the word. It refers to a comprehensive explanation of some aspect of nature that is supported by

300-435: A given subject matter. There are theories in many and varied fields of study, including the arts and sciences. A formal theory is syntactic in nature and is only meaningful when given a semantic component by applying it to some content (e.g., facts and relationships of the actual historical world as it is unfolding). Theories in various fields of study are often expressed in natural language , but can be constructed in such

350-447: A recursively enumerable set) in which the concept of natural numbers can be expressed, can include all true statements about them. As a result, some domains of knowledge cannot be formalized, accurately and completely, as mathematical theories. (Here, formalizing accurately and completely means that all true propositions—and only true propositions—are derivable within the mathematical system.) This limitation, however, in no way precludes

400-437: A single textbook. In mathematical logic , a theory has a related but different sense: it is the collection of the theorems that can be deduced from a given set of axioms , given a given set of inference rules . A theory can be either descriptive as in science, or prescriptive ( normative ) as in philosophy. The latter are those whose subject matter consists not of empirical data, but rather of ideas . At least some of

450-552: A small set of basic postulates (usually symmetries, like equality of locations in space or in time, or identity of electrons, etc.)—which is capable of producing experimental predictions for a given category of physical systems. One good example is classical electromagnetism , which encompasses results derived from gauge symmetry (sometimes called gauge invariance) in a form of a few equations called Maxwell's equations . The specific mathematical aspects of classical electromagnetic theory are termed "laws of electromagnetism", reflecting

500-481: A technical term in philosophy in Ancient Greek . As an everyday word, theoria , θεωρία , meant "looking at, viewing, beholding", but in more technical contexts it came to refer to contemplative or speculative understandings of natural things , such as those of natural philosophers , as opposed to more practical ways of knowing things, like that of skilled orators or artisans. English-speakers have used

550-403: A theory of heat as energy replaced it. Also, the theory that phlogiston is a substance released from burning and rusting material was eliminated with the new understanding of the reactivity of oxygen. Theories are distinct from theorems . A theorem is derived deductively from axioms (basic assumptions) according to a formal system of rules, sometimes as an end in itself and sometimes as

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600-404: A theory's content is based on some formal system of logic and on basic axioms . In a deductive theory, any sentence which is a logical consequence of one or more of the axioms is also a sentence of that theory. This is called the received view of theories . In the semantic view of theories , which has largely replaced the received view, theories are viewed as scientific models . A model

650-548: A vast body of evidence. Many scientific theories are so well established that no new evidence is likely to alter them substantially. For example, no new evidence will demonstrate that the Earth does not orbit around the sun (heliocentric theory), or that living things are not made of cells (cell theory), that matter is not composed of atoms, or that the surface of the Earth is not divided into solid plates that have moved over geological timescales (the theory of plate tectonics) ... One of

700-419: A way that their general form is identical to a theory as it is expressed in the formal language of mathematical logic . Theories may be expressed mathematically, symbolically, or in common language, but are generally expected to follow principles of rational thought or logic . Theory is constructed of a set of sentences that are thought to be true statements about the subject under consideration. However,

750-569: Is a rational type of abstract thinking about a phenomenon , or the results of such thinking. The process of contemplative and rational thinking is often associated with such processes as observational study or research. Theories may be scientific , belong to a non-scientific discipline, or no discipline at all. Depending on the context, a theory's assertions might, for example, include generalized explanations of how nature works. The word has its roots in ancient Greek , but in modern use it has taken on several related meanings. In modern science,

800-421: Is a logical framework intended to represent reality (a "model of reality"), similar to the way that a map is a graphical model that represents the territory of a city or country. In this approach, theories are a specific category of models that fulfill the necessary criteria. (See Theories as models for further discussion.) In physics the term theory is generally used for a mathematical framework—derived from

850-526: Is a statement that can be derived from those axioms by application of these rules of inference. Theories used in applications are abstractions of observed phenomena and the resulting theorems provide solutions to real-world problems. Obvious examples include arithmetic (abstracting concepts of number), geometry (concepts of space), and probability (concepts of randomness and likelihood). Gödel's incompleteness theorem shows that no consistent, recursively enumerable theory (that is, one whose theorems form

900-490: Is relevant to practice. In the context of management, Van de Van and Johnson propose a form of engaged scholarship where scholars examine problems that occur in practice, in an interdisciplinary fashion, producing results that create both new practical results as well as new theoretical models, but targeting theoretical results shared in an academic fashion. They use a metaphor of "arbitrage" of ideas between disciplines, distinguishing it from collaboration. In science,

950-709: Is under the theory. Sometimes two theories have exactly the same explanatory power because they make the same predictions. A pair of such theories is called indistinguishable or observationally equivalent , and the choice between them reduces to convenience or philosophical preference. The form of theories is studied formally in mathematical logic, especially in model theory . When theories are studied in mathematics, they are usually expressed in some formal language and their statements are closed under application of certain procedures called rules of inference . A special case of this, an axiomatic theory, consists of axioms (or axiom schemata) and rules of inference. A theorem

1000-629: The BASF convinced Wittig to take this opportunity. He worked at the University of Heidelberg even after his retirement in 1967 and published papers until 1980. Most of his awards were presented during this time at Heidelberg, such as the honorary doctorate of the Sorbonne in 1956 and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1979. Wittig's contributions also include the preparation of phenyllithium and

1050-581: The Greek language . In the book From Religion to Philosophy , Francis Cornford suggests that the Orphics used the word theoria to mean "passionate sympathetic contemplation". Pythagoras changed the word to mean "the passionless contemplation of rational, unchanging truth" of mathematical knowledge, because he considered this intellectual pursuit the way to reach the highest plane of existence. Pythagoras emphasized subduing emotions and bodily desires to help

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1100-561: The University of Heidelberg with Wittig in 1961. He became professor at the University of Göttingen . This article about a German chemist is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Georg Wittig Wittig was born in Berlin, Germany and shortly after his birth moved with his family to Kassel , where his father was professor at the applied arts high school. He attended school in Kassel and started studying chemistry at

1150-408: The University of Tübingen 1916. He was drafted and became a lieutenant in the cavalry of Hesse-Kassel (or Hesse-Cassel). After being an Allied prisoner of war from 1918 until 1919, Wittig found it hard to restart his chemistry studies owing to overcrowding at the universities. By a direct plea to Karl von Auwers , who was professor for organic chemistry at the University of Marburg at the time, he

1200-470: The University of Tübingen . Most of his scientific work, including the development of the Wittig reaction , was performed during this time in Tübingen. The 1956 appointment of the nearly sixty-year-old Wittig as head of the organic chemistry department at the University of Heidelberg as successor of Karl Freudenberg was exceptional even at that time. The newly built department and the close connection to

1250-564: The aims are different. Theoretical contemplation considers things humans do not move or change, such as nature , so it has no human aim apart from itself and the knowledge it helps create. On the other hand, praxis involves thinking, but always with an aim to desired actions, whereby humans cause change or movement themselves for their own ends. Any human movement that involves no conscious choice and thinking could not be an example of praxis or doing. Theories are analytical tools for understanding , explaining , and making predictions about

1300-414: The axioms of that field. Some commonly known examples include set theory and number theory ; however literary theory , critical theory , and music theory are also of the same form. One form of philosophical theory is a metatheory or meta-theory . A metatheory is a theory whose subject matter is some other theory or set of theories. In other words, it is a theory about theories. Statements made in

1350-436: The construction of mathematical theories that formalize large bodies of scientific knowledge. A theory is underdetermined (also called indeterminacy of data to theory ) if a rival, inconsistent theory is at least as consistent with the evidence. Underdetermination is an epistemological issue about the relation of evidence to conclusions. A theory that lacks supporting evidence is generally, more properly, referred to as

1400-451: The discipline of medicine: medical theory involves trying to understand the causes and nature of health and sickness, while the practical side of medicine is trying to make people healthy. These two things are related but can be independent, because it is possible to research health and sickness without curing specific patients, and it is possible to cure a patient without knowing how the cure worked. The English word theory derives from

1450-443: The discovery of the 1,2-Wittig rearrangement and the 2,3-Wittig rearrangement . Wittig was well known in the chemistry community for being a consummate experimenter and observer of chemical transformations, while caring very little for the theoretical and mechanistic underpinnings of the work he produced. Georg also has his name on a literature work titled on a compound labelled Colopidalol . Theoretical A theory

1500-400: The elementary theorems of a philosophical theory are statements whose truth cannot necessarily be scientifically tested through empirical observation . A field of study is sometimes named a "theory" because its basis is some initial set of assumptions describing the field's approach to the subject. These assumptions are the elementary theorems of the particular theory, and can be thought of as

1550-489: The forced retirement of Fries, in 1937 Hermann Staudinger offered Wittig a position at the University of Freiburg , partly because he knew Wittig from his book on stereochemistry in which he supported Staudinger's highly criticized theory of macromolecules. The foundations of carbanion chemistry were laid during Wittig's time in Freiburg. In 1944 he succeeded the head of the organic chemistry department Wilhelm Schlenk at

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1600-443: The intellect function at the higher plane of theory. Thus, it was Pythagoras who gave the word theory the specific meaning that led to the classical and modern concept of a distinction between theory (as uninvolved, neutral thinking) and practice. Aristotle's terminology, as already mentioned, contrasts theory with praxis or practice, and this contrast exists till today. For Aristotle, both practice and theory involve thinking, but

1650-650: The level of consistent and reproducible evidence that supports them. Within electromagnetic theory generally, there are numerous hypotheses about how electromagnetism applies to specific situations. Many of these hypotheses are already considered adequately tested, with new ones always in the making and perhaps untested. Certain tests may be infeasible or technically difficult. As a result, theories may make predictions that have not been confirmed or proven incorrect. These predictions may be described informally as "theoretical". They can be tested later, and if they are incorrect, this may lead to revision, invalidation, or rejection of

1700-446: The metatheory about the theory are called metatheorems . A political theory is an ethical theory about the law and government. Often the term "political theory" refers to a general view, or specific ethic, political belief or attitude, thought about politics. In social science, jurisprudence is the philosophical theory of law. Contemporary philosophy of law addresses problems internal to law and legal systems, and problems of law as

1750-436: The most reliable, rigorous, and comprehensive form of scientific knowledge, in contrast to more common uses of the word "theory" that imply that something is unproven or speculative (which in formal terms is better characterized by the word hypothesis ). Scientific theories are distinguished from hypotheses, which are individual empirically testable conjectures , and from scientific laws , which are descriptive accounts of

1800-622: The most useful properties of scientific theories is that they can be used to make predictions about natural events or phenomena that have not yet been observed. From the American Association for the Advancement of Science : A scientific theory is a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world, based on a body of facts that have been repeatedly confirmed through observation and experiment. Such fact-supported theories are not "guesses" but reliable accounts of

1850-411: The new one describes the same reality, only more completely. When a new theory uses new terms that do not reduce to terms of an older theory, but rather replace them because they misrepresent reality, it is called an intertheoretic elimination. For instance, the obsolete scientific theory that put forward an understanding of heat transfer in terms of the movement of caloric fluid was eliminated when

1900-400: The possibility of faulty inference or incorrect observation. Sometimes theories are incorrect, meaning that an explicit set of observations contradicts some fundamental objection or application of the theory, but more often theories are corrected to conform to new observations, by restricting the class of phenomena the theory applies to or changing the assertions made. An example of the former is

1950-517: The real world. The theory of biological evolution is more than "just a theory." It is as factual an explanation of the universe as the atomic theory of matter or the germ theory of disease. Our understanding of gravity is still a work in progress. But the phenomenon of gravity, like evolution, is an accepted fact. The term theory is not appropriate for describing scientific models or untested, but intricate hypotheses. The logical positivists thought of scientific theories as deductive theories —that

2000-432: The restriction of classical mechanics to phenomena involving macroscopic length scales and particle speeds much lower than the speed of light. Theory is often distinguished from practice or praxis. The question of whether theoretical models of work are relevant to work itself is of interest to scholars of professions such as medicine, engineering, law, and management. The gap between theory and practice has been framed as

2050-448: The speaker did not experience or test before. In science, this same concept is referred to as a hypothesis , and the word "hypothetically" is used both inside and outside of science. In its usage outside of science, the word "theory" is very often contrasted to " practice " (from Greek praxis , πρᾶξις) a Greek term for doing , which is opposed to theory. A "classical example" of the distinction between "theoretical" and "practical" uses

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2100-409: The term "theory" refers to scientific theories , a well-confirmed type of explanation of nature , made in a way consistent with the scientific method , and fulfilling the criteria required by modern science . Such theories are described in such a way that scientific tests should be able to provide empirical support for it, or empirical contradiction (" falsify ") of it. Scientific theories are

2150-416: The term "theory" refers to "a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world, based on a body of facts that have been repeatedly confirmed through observation and experiment." Theories must also meet further requirements, such as the ability to make falsifiable predictions with consistent accuracy across a broad area of scientific inquiry, and production of strong evidence in favor of

2200-497: The theory from multiple independent sources ( consilience ). The strength of a scientific theory is related to the diversity of phenomena it can explain, which is measured by its ability to make falsifiable predictions with respect to those phenomena. Theories are improved (or replaced by better theories) as more evidence is gathered, so that accuracy in prediction improves over time; this increased accuracy corresponds to an increase in scientific knowledge. Scientists use theories as

2250-557: The theory. In mathematics, the term theory is used differently than its use in science ─ necessarily so, since mathematics contains no explanations of natural phenomena per se , even though it may help provide insight into natural systems or be inspired by them. In the general sense, a mathematical theory is a branch of mathematics devoted to some specific topics or methods, such as set theory , number theory , group theory , probability theory , game theory , control theory , perturbation theory , etc., such as might be appropriate for

2300-407: The truth of any one of these statements is always relative to the whole theory. Therefore, the same statement may be true with respect to one theory, and not true with respect to another. This is, in ordinary language, where statements such as "He is a terrible person" cannot be judged as true or false without reference to some interpretation of who "He" is and for that matter what a "terrible person"

2350-446: The way nature behaves under certain conditions. Theories guide the enterprise of finding facts rather than of reaching goals, and are neutral concerning alternatives among values. A theory can be a body of knowledge , which may or may not be associated with particular explanatory models . To theorize is to develop this body of knowledge. The word theory or "in theory" is sometimes used outside of science to refer to something which

2400-469: The word theory since at least the late 16th century. Modern uses of the word theory derive from the original definition, but have taken on new shades of meaning, still based on the idea of a theory as a thoughtful and rational explanation of the general nature of things. Although it has more mundane meanings in Greek, the word θεωρία apparently developed special uses early in the recorded history of

2450-464: Was able to resume university study and after 3 years was awarded the Ph.D. in organic chemistry. Karl von Auwers was able to convince him to start an academic career, leading to his habilitation in 1926. He became a close friend of Karl Ziegler , who was also doing his habilitation with Auwers during that time. The successor of Karl von Auwers , Hans Meerwein , accepted Wittig as lecturer, partly because he

2500-632: Was impressed by the new 400-page book on stereochemistry that Wittig had written. In 1931 Wittig married Waltraud Ernst, a colleague from the Auwers working group. The invitation of Karl Fries brought him as professor to the TU Braunschweig in 1932. The time in Braunschweig became more and more problematic as the Nazis tried to get rid of Karl Fries and Wittig showed solidarity with him. After

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