Science Quote by Edward Appleton

Appleton’s line is a quiet rebuke to the lab culture that treats expertise like a finished product. Coming from a scientist who helped map the ionosphere - work that demanded patience, improvisation, and long odds - “enthusiasm” isn’t pep talk; it’s a performance variable. In research, professional skill is the baseline: you learn the math, the instruments, the protocols. Enthusiasm is what keeps you running the tenth trial after nine ambiguous results, what makes you chase a weird signal instead of filing it under “noise,” what turns an inconvenience into a clue.

The phrasing “rate... even above” is telling. Appleton isn’t dismissing competence; he’s ranking what actually drives discovery. Skill can be credentialed and audited. Enthusiasm is harder to counterfeit and harder to teach. It’s the energy that makes a scientist porous to surprise, willing to be wrong in public, willing to do the unglamorous work that precedes the “eureka” image science sells to outsiders.

There’s also a managerial subtext: this is advice for choosing people. In mid-20th-century science, especially around wartime and postwar research, teams scaled up and specialization intensified. Appleton’s hierarchy pushes back against the idea that you can staff innovation the way you staff a bureaucracy. You can hire trained hands; what you can’t easily hire is the inner engine that keeps those hands moving when the known tools stop working.