Science & Tech Quote by Polykarp Kusch

There is a quiet swagger in Kusch's modesty: he frames his career not as a personal triumph but as a lucky ticket to a historically rare moment. Coming from a mid-century physicist whose work helped sharpen the measurements that underwrite modern particle physics, "participate" is doing the heavy lifting. It's the word of someone who knows science is less lone-genius heroics than a relay race of instruments, colleagues, and institutional support. He casts himself as a citizen of an ecosystem, not its monarch.

The subtext is also political. Kusch lived through the century when physics became inseparable from the state: wartime mobilization, Cold War funding, the rise of Big Science labs, the moral hangover of nuclear weaponry. To call this "fortunate" reads as gratitude with a shadow behind it. He's acknowledging the abundance of opportunity (grants, accelerators, a booming research culture) while avoiding any claim that the era was purely benign. It's an era that made scientific lives possible at scale, and made scientific consequences unavoidable.

The line works because it sidesteps the vanity baked into a lot of scientific autobiography. Kusch is not asking to be admired; he's implying that the real marvel is the historical aperture itself - a period when new theories and precision experiments could still redraw the map of reality. The sentiment is humble, but it also draws a boundary: his achievement is inseparable from the time that enabled it, and the time that demanded it.