Science Quote by Martin Fleischmann

Retirement, in Fleischmann's framing, is less a life stage than a category error. "I don't suppose" does quiet work: it softens the claim, signals an experimental temperament, and implies the speaker is reporting an observation about himself rather than making a grand vow. The line is almost offhand, but it carries a scientist's stubborn faith that curiosity outlives contracts, titles, and institutional calendars.

The subtext is also defensive. Fleischmann is remembered most publicly for the 1989 cold fusion episode - a scientific and media firestorm that turned lab talk into front-page spectacle and made him a symbol in arguments about peer review, hype, and intellectual risk. Against that backdrop, "retire completely" reads like a refusal to be neatly concluded by controversy. Not: I will be vindicated. Just: you won't get the satisfying ending where I step away and let the story finalize without me.

There's an ethical statement tucked inside the modesty. Science isn't treated as a job you clock out of; it's a practice, even a compulsion. "Completely" is the tell: he allows for partial withdrawal from institutions or public battles, but not from thinking, tinkering, testing. For a researcher whose career straddled respected electrochemistry and an infamous claim, the sentence works as self-portrait and strategy: keep the posture of inquiry, keep the door open, deny the audience the closure it wants.