"I tend not to dwell too much on ultimates"
About this Quote
A Nobel-winning cosmologist refusing to “dwell too much on ultimates” is less a dodge than a discipline. Perlmutter’s career helped pin down one of the biggest shockers in modern physics: the universe isn’t just expanding, it’s accelerating. If anyone has earned the right to wax metaphysical, it’s the guy who helped reintroduce “dark energy” into public vocabulary. Instead, he pulls the emergency brake on grand conclusions.
The phrasing is doing quiet work. “Tend” signals habit rather than doctrine: he’s not anti-philosophy, he’s pro-method. “Dwell” suggests an unproductive kind of lingering, the mental equivalent of staring into a cosmic abyss until you mistake vertigo for insight. And “ultimates” is deliberately vague, a bucket big enough to hold God-questions, final theories, and the seductive fantasy that science will eventually arrive at a clean, end-of-book answer.
In context, it reads like a scientist’s immune response to the way cosmology gets consumed: every measurement becomes a headline about “the fate of everything.” Perlmutter’s caution protects the work from being hijacked by certainty merchants, whether they’re pop-science pundits selling meaning or critics insisting science must produce it. The subtext is humility with teeth: the universe is legible in parts, and those parts matter, but the urge to turn provisional models into ultimate narratives is a cognitive trap.
It also doubles as a personal ethos. When your data upends expectations, you learn to respect the gap between what’s measurable and what’s merely satisfying.
The phrasing is doing quiet work. “Tend” signals habit rather than doctrine: he’s not anti-philosophy, he’s pro-method. “Dwell” suggests an unproductive kind of lingering, the mental equivalent of staring into a cosmic abyss until you mistake vertigo for insight. And “ultimates” is deliberately vague, a bucket big enough to hold God-questions, final theories, and the seductive fantasy that science will eventually arrive at a clean, end-of-book answer.
In context, it reads like a scientist’s immune response to the way cosmology gets consumed: every measurement becomes a headline about “the fate of everything.” Perlmutter’s caution protects the work from being hijacked by certainty merchants, whether they’re pop-science pundits selling meaning or critics insisting science must produce it. The subtext is humility with teeth: the universe is legible in parts, and those parts matter, but the urge to turn provisional models into ultimate narratives is a cognitive trap.
It also doubles as a personal ethos. When your data upends expectations, you learn to respect the gap between what’s measurable and what’s merely satisfying.
Quote Details
| Topic | Deep |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
More Quotes by Saul
Add to List
