Science Quote by Saul Perlmutter

Perlmutter’s line walks a tightrope that almost no one in public life is asked to balance: loyalty without parochialism. He doesn’t deny nationalism; he domesticates it. “Team spirit” is intentionally casual, almost sporty, a phrase that makes patriotism sound like something you can put on and take off rather than a sacred identity. That rhetorical choice matters. It reframes national pride as a motivation, not a mandate - compatible with, and even subordinate to, the larger project of shared discovery.

The subtext is a rebuttal to the common suspicion that science is either too “global” to be trusted or too “national” to be pure. Perlmutter proposes a double allegiance: you can want your country to win funding, prestige, and Nobel-class breakthroughs, while still treating knowledge as a commons that only advances through openness. In a field where results must be reproducible anywhere, the “international community” isn’t a feel-good ideal; it’s infrastructure. Peer review, conferences, shared instruments, cross-border collaborations - these aren’t add-ons, they’re how the machine runs.

Contextually, this sits in the late-20th/early-21st century reality of Big Science: multinational telescopes, global data pipelines, immigration-heavy labs, and political fights over who counts as “us.” Coming from a Nobel-winning cosmologist, it reads like a quiet defense of scientific cosmopolitanism at a time when borders are being rhetorically hardened. He’s arguing, with disarming simplicity, that the best kind of “team” is one whose victory condition is truth.