Time & Perspective Quote by Sidney Altman

A single book, arriving seven years after an earlier turning point, becomes the origin story that scientists rarely get to tell without sounding mythic. Altman’s recollection is careful: it’s not “science changed my life,” it’s the periodic table specifically, and the shock of its elegance. That choice matters. The periodic table isn’t just information; it’s a compressed argument about reality. It takes a messy world of substances and snaps it into a grid where gaps aren’t failures but invitations. You can look at what isn’t there and predict what should be. For a mind wired toward discovery, that’s intoxicating.

The intent is to praise theory at the exact moment it stops being abstraction and becomes a tool. Altman emphasizes “predictive power,” a phrase that quietly rejects the stereotype of science as mere cataloging. He’s describing the seduction of structure: the feeling that nature is legible, that hidden order can be inferred from patterns rather than brute-force experience. Subtextually, he’s also laying claim to a particular scientific temperament: reverence for models that explain more than they contain, for frameworks that reduce the world without flattening it.

Context sharpens it. Altman came of age in the postwar era when scientific authority was ascendant and chemistry’s periodic logic had become a cultural emblem of modernity. As a Nobel-winning biochemist (and a figure tied to RNA’s unexpected capabilities), he would later work in domains where “elegance” is not decoration but evidence: if your theory predicts something the lab hasn’t seen yet, it earns the right to be believed. The memory reads like a confession of faith in science’s most persuasive trick: making the unknown feel inevitable.