Science Quote by Jack Steinberger

The line lands with the quiet force of someone who has spent a lifetime letting results speak, then casually reminds you what the stakes used to be. Steinberger opens with credential and competence - chemical engineering, good student - then swerves immediately into contingency: the Great Depression as an external interrupt, a scholarship ending not because of merit but because the economic floor dropped out. It’s an origin story stripped of romance, almost aggressively plain, and that’s the point. The understated tone works like a moral argument against the myth of the self-made genius: talent exists, yes, but it travels on infrastructure - scholarships, institutions, household stability - and those supports can vanish.

The subtext is class pressure rendered as a simple necessity: “it was necessary to work.” Not “I chose,” not “I decided,” but necessity as a physical law. The phrase “supplement the family income” widens the frame from individual ambition to collective survival, positioning education as negotiable and family obligation as non-negotiable. That’s a particularly sharp reversal for a scientist whose later career would be associated with high-energy physics and big institutions; the quote quietly maps the distance between precarious beginnings and the postwar scientific world that would come to fund long horizons.

Contextually, it’s also an immigrant-era American refrain without the theatrics. The Depression isn’t invoked to solicit pity; it’s deployed as a fact-pattern explaining why even “good students” don’t always get a straight path. In a few spare clauses, Steinberger smuggles in a critique of how societies waste potential - and how often “merit” is just what survives the bill.