Science Quote by Robert Barany

Deference dressed up as modesty, this line is doing reputational triage. Barany frames failure as a kind of credential: if two "great research scientists" came up empty, then the rest of the field never had a chance. The move is rhetorically neat because it turns an absence of answers into evidence of difficulty, and difficulty into a moral alibi for everyone involved. He isn’t just reporting an impasse; he’s managing blame.

The key phrase is "small wonder", a soft, almost genteel shrug that carries a sharper message: stop expecting miracles from lesser minds. It flatters the giants while simultaneously lowering the bar for their peers. In the competitive, prestige-driven culture of early 20th-century science, that’s a strategic stance. It signals allegiance to an elite lineage and implies that any later breakthrough would require new methods, not just more effort or better reasoning. Barany, a physiologist associated with pioneering work on the vestibular system, understood that whole research communities can stall when tools lag behind questions.

There’s also a quiet politics here about how scientific narratives get written. By centering "two great" figures and their limits, Barany sets the cast list for who counts in the story of discovery. Everyone else becomes a supporting character whose failure is pre-excused. It’s a humane gesture, but also gatekeeping: progress is portrayed as the province of exceptional individuals, not messy collective trial and error.