Time & Perspective Quote by George Andrew Olah

The line reads like polite travel diary, but its real charge is about how science actually moves: not just through papers, but through proximity, access, and a certain old-world etiquette of gatekeeping. Olah is describing a first trip to London as a professional threshold moment, when admiration at a distance becomes an exchange at eye level. The detail that he “knew and admired [their work] from the literature” signals a pre-internet reality in which journals were the only reliable bridge across borders. London isn’t scenery; it’s infrastructure. It’s where reputations are made legible and where a young or newly arrived researcher can be authenticated by contact.

“Personal contact” does quiet double duty. On the surface, it’s networking. Underneath, it’s a scientist’s admission that citation isn’t communion: you can’t ask a paper what it really meant, what failed, what they didn’t publish, or what they’re thinking next. The subtext is mentorship and informal transmission - the hallway talk, the lab visit, the sense of being welcomed into a community that could have remained an intimidating pantheon.

Then there’s the diplomacy of “most gracious and helpful.” Olah isn’t simply praising manners; he’s recording relief. For a scientist who lived through mid-century upheavals and rebuilt a career across continents, that graciousness implies something earned and precarious: belonging. The sentence becomes a small testament to cosmopolitan science at its best - competitive, yes, but sustained by generosity and the recognition that ideas need hospitable rooms to survive.