Time & Perspective Quote by Alfred Day Hershey

A scientist calling happiness a "curious fact" is doing more than being modest; he is smuggling wonder into the language of empiricism. Alfred Day Hershey frames the Nobel Prize not as a triumphal coronation but as an observable social phenomenon: a repeatable event ("year after year") that reliably produces an emotional outcome across widening circles of relation. That phrasing matters. It treats prestige like a kind of cultural chemistry, where recognition reacts with the public imagination and yields joy as a byproduct.

The sly move is in the scope. Hershey starts with the obvious beneficiaries - recipients, colleagues, friends - then pushes outward to "even to strangers". The word "even" is the hinge: it acknowledges that this is irrational on its face. Why should someone feel uplifted by an accolade bestowed on a person they will never meet? The subtext is that the Nobel functions as a shared story of human capability. In a world where scientific labor is often invisible, technical, and slow, the prize offers a clean narrative arc: discovery, validation, meaning. Strangers borrow that meaning for themselves, if only briefly.

Contextually, Hershey lived through an era when science was both a public savior and a public threat - polio vaccines and antibiotics on one side, nuclear weapons on the other. His observation lands as a quiet defense of science as a communal good. The Nobel, for all its politics and limits, becomes a rare ritual that lets society feel progress without having to understand every mechanism behind it.