Science Quote by Manfred Eigen

Eigen is doing that most scientist-of-scientists move: puncturing our romance with elegant explanations. The jab lands because it draws a brutal distinction between correctness and usefulness. A theory, in the classical sense, stakes a claim about how the world is; it risks being falsified. A model, by contrast, is a tool - a deliberately simplified contraption built to answer a particular question under particular constraints. It can match the data, even match reality in some local way, and still be the wrong instrument for the job.

The third possibility - “right, but irrelevant” - is where modern technoscience quietly goes to die. Think of a climate model that captures global averages while missing regional extremes people actually experience, or a beautifully fitted biological model that ignores the one interaction that drives disease progression. Eigen’s subtext is a warning against mistaking fit for insight, precision for significance. A model can be “right” in the narrow sense (internally consistent, empirically adequate on the training set, faithful to an idealized slice of the phenomenon) yet irrelevant to the decision, mechanism, or scale that matters.

Context matters: Eigen helped found molecular evolution and worked in fields where complexity is the rule and simplification is unavoidable. In that world, the central intellectual virtue isn’t just being correct; it’s choosing what to be wrong about. His line pushes for humility with a spine: don’t celebrate a model until you can name the question it answers - and the questions it quietly refuses.