Science & Tech Quote by Peter Hammill

Hammill’s line reads like a quiet manifesto from a musician who never fully bought the rock-world fantasy that feeling is pure and thinking is contamination. “Science for its own sake” signals genuine curiosity, not a cosplay of intelligence. But the second half is where the voltage is: science as metaphor, not as authority. He’s not arguing that physics can “explain” the soul; he’s admitting that the scientific worldview has become one of the main imaginative engines we use to narrate anxiety, risk, and belonging in modern life.

The phrasing holds two loyalties in tension. “For its own sake” suggests reverence for method, for impersonal truth, for the beauty of systems that don’t care about us. Then “as a metaphor for our current lives” reclaims that cold clarity for art: science becomes a language for uncertainty (probability, chaos, feedback loops), for alienation (distance, scale, abstraction), for the way humans are increasingly mediated by instruments and models. In a culture where “trust the science” can sound like either salvation or scolding, Hammill sidesteps the trench warfare. He’s after science as a mental habit and as an aesthetic: precision, skepticism, awe.

Context matters: Hammill comes out of the progressive rock ecosystem, where literary ambition and conceptual sprawl were features, not sins. The subtext is a defense of that impulse against the charge of pretension. He’s saying: the lab and the lyric aren’t rivals; they’re two ways of staying honest about the world we’re stuck in.