Science & Tech Quote by Martin Fleischmann

A “caricature” is a self-indictment that doubles as a dare: Fleischmann casts his own working style as exaggerated, almost cartoonish, yet somehow truer than the polite official portrait. The line lands because it borrows a term from satire to describe a scientific culture that prides itself on understatement. By choosing “caricature,” he hints that British science isn’t only method and restraint; it’s also stubbornness, improvisation, and a certain gentlemanly confidence that you can make the apparatus behave if you keep tinkering.

The subtext is defensive, too. Fleischmann’s name is inseparable from the cold fusion saga of 1989, when he and Stanley Pons announced extraordinary results before the community could reliably reproduce them. In that light, “the way I work” reads like an explanation and a provocation: yes, I’m idiosyncratic, perhaps recklessly hands-on, perhaps too willing to trust craft knowledge and intuition over consensus, peer choreography, and institutional gatekeeping.

“British science” here is less a passport than a mythos: the lone experimenter with a bench, a nose for phenomena, and impatience with bureaucratic cadence. Fleischmann implies he embodies that tradition so strongly it warps into parody, a figure so committed to the archetype that it becomes suspect. The line’s effectiveness comes from its double edge. It flatters and critiques his culture at once, inviting you to ask whether the caricature is a proud exaggeration or a cautionary sketch of what happens when national scientific temperament meets world-historic claims.