Science Quote by Edward Teller

Teller flips the courtroom script to expose a quiet scandal in how “objective” knowledge actually gets treated. Facts, he implies, aren’t crowned facts because they’re pure; they’re “innocent” because they’re socially protected. If “everyone believes” a statement, it coasts on consensus, not on perpetual scrutiny. That’s a scientist’s provocation aimed less at lab technique than at the culture surrounding it: belief masquerading as certainty, reputation doing the work of evidence.

The second half turns the knife. A hypothesis is “guilty” because novelty is a kind of social crime. New ideas arrive already burdened with suspicion, not because skepticism is bad, but because communities (including scientific ones) have immune systems. Teller’s phrasing is deliberately unfair in a revealing way: hypotheses aren’t “found true,” they’re “found effective.” That utilitarian pivot nods to the messy reality of physics, where models earn their keep by predicting, engineering, and surviving contact with the world. It’s also Teller, the hydrogen bomb architect and Cold War hawk, talking: a man steeped in the politics of expertise, where “effectiveness” can mean technological success long before moral consensus catches up.

The subtext isn’t anti-science; it’s anti-complacency. Teller warns that orthodoxy can be lazy, and innovation can be punished for arriving out of turn. The irony is that both instincts are necessary: “facts” need perpetual cross-examination, and hypotheses need skepticism without becoming a hazing ritual. His aphorism works because it admits the human drama inside scientific method: credibility, gatekeeping, and the anxiety of being wrong.