Citations:handwavy

Adjective

 * 1933, Sinclair Lewis, Ann Vickers:
 * Just caught this silly Ph. D. hand-wavy manner. I suppose it's part of the trade — the way Mr. Klebs used to look at a shoe sole, look wise. Scientific attitude. I wonder if I'll ever learn it.


 * 1974, Harry C. Andrews, review of Introduction to Diffraction, Information Processing, and Holography by Francis T. S. Yu, in IEEE Transactions on Communication Technology, v. 22, no. 5, p. 733:
 * In Chapter 9, "Image Restoration and Information," the information theoretic arguments for image restoration are not very illuminating. In addition, the concept of "recording over maximum allowable exposure time" is nebulous. The uncertainty and information section is hand-wavy and ill defined, but the discussion on analytic continuation is reasonable.


 * 2007, Ian Stewart, Why Beauty Is Truth: A History of Symmetry:
 * What, exactly, is symmetry? Before Galois, all answers to this question were rather vague, handwavy things, with appeals to features like elegance of proportion. This is not a concept you can do sensible mathematics with.


 * 2008, Eric Baird, Relativity in Curved Spacetime: Life Without Special Relativity:
 * How do we turn our weak, "hand-wavy" arguments into more concrete sets of testable mathematics?