"For me, this world of questions and the provisional, this chase after an answer that was always put off to the next day, all that was euphoric. I lived in the future"
About this Quote
Euphoria, here, doesn not come from certainty but from delay. Francois Jacob makes the scientist's most private addiction sound almost illicit: the thrill of a question that refuses to close. "The provisional" is doing heavy lifting. It frames knowledge not as a monument but as scaffolding - useful, temporary, destined to be replaced. That is the quiet rebuke to how the public often wants science to behave: as a vending machine for final answers, not a practice built on revision, embarrassment, and better approximations.
The line about an answer "always put off to the next day" reads like a lab-bench version of romantic suspense. Jacob isnt confessing frustration; hes describing a self-sustaining engine of motivation. Postponement becomes productive. The subtext is that certainty can be deadening, even anti-scientific, because it ends the chase. A good hypothesis is less a destination than a permission slip to keep moving.
"I lived in the future" ties the psychology to a historical moment. Jacob, a major figure in molecular biology, worked in an era when life was being re-described in information terms - regulation, code, control. To "live in the future" is to inhabit a horizon of experiments not yet run, instruments not yet built, models not yet proved wrong. Its also a personal credo: the scientist as someone who dwells, willingly, in non-finality. Jacob turns that into not a hardship but a kind of joy - the rare pleasure of making peace with not knowing, then turning it into work.
The line about an answer "always put off to the next day" reads like a lab-bench version of romantic suspense. Jacob isnt confessing frustration; hes describing a self-sustaining engine of motivation. Postponement becomes productive. The subtext is that certainty can be deadening, even anti-scientific, because it ends the chase. A good hypothesis is less a destination than a permission slip to keep moving.
"I lived in the future" ties the psychology to a historical moment. Jacob, a major figure in molecular biology, worked in an era when life was being re-described in information terms - regulation, code, control. To "live in the future" is to inhabit a horizon of experiments not yet run, instruments not yet built, models not yet proved wrong. Its also a personal credo: the scientist as someone who dwells, willingly, in non-finality. Jacob turns that into not a hardship but a kind of joy - the rare pleasure of making peace with not knowing, then turning it into work.
Quote Details
| Topic | Knowledge |
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