"I am sure my fellow-scientists will agree with me if I say that whatever we were able to achieve in our later years had its origin in the experiences of our youth and in the hopes and wishes which were formed before and during our time as students"
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Bloch is doing something disarmingly strategic here: he flattens the myth of the lone, fully formed genius and replaces it with a quieter origin story - apprenticeship, longing, and the half-articulated ambitions you carry before you have credentials to justify them. By opening with “I am sure my fellow-scientists will agree,” he’s not just being polite. He’s building a chorus. The sentence recruits a community to validate a claim that could otherwise sound sentimental: that the real motor of scientific achievement is not only intellect or technique, but early experience and desire.
The key word is “origin.” Bloch isn’t arguing that youth determines outcomes in a rigid, biographical way; he’s tracing the root system. Later achievements are depicted as growth rings around earlier curiosities: the first encounter with a problem, the first mentor who made a life in science seem plausible, the first private hope that you might contribute. “Hopes and wishes” is unusually exposed language for a physicist, and that’s the point. It smuggles emotion into a culture that often pretends it runs solely on method.
Context matters: Bloch, a foundational figure in nuclear magnetic resonance, lived through the 20th century’s upheavals and the mass migration of European scientific talent. For that generation, “experiences of our youth” could include displacement, ideological rupture, and the urgency of rebuilding intellectual life elsewhere. The line becomes a defense of education and formative environments - a reminder that breakthroughs don’t begin at the lab bench; they begin in the permissions and possibilities given to young people.
The key word is “origin.” Bloch isn’t arguing that youth determines outcomes in a rigid, biographical way; he’s tracing the root system. Later achievements are depicted as growth rings around earlier curiosities: the first encounter with a problem, the first mentor who made a life in science seem plausible, the first private hope that you might contribute. “Hopes and wishes” is unusually exposed language for a physicist, and that’s the point. It smuggles emotion into a culture that often pretends it runs solely on method.
Context matters: Bloch, a foundational figure in nuclear magnetic resonance, lived through the 20th century’s upheavals and the mass migration of European scientific talent. For that generation, “experiences of our youth” could include displacement, ideological rupture, and the urgency of rebuilding intellectual life elsewhere. The line becomes a defense of education and formative environments - a reminder that breakthroughs don’t begin at the lab bench; they begin in the permissions and possibilities given to young people.
Quote Details
| Topic | Student |
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