Science Quote by Clyde Tombaugh

A discoverer of worlds, Tombaugh still sounds faintly awed by the one he lived on. The line is doing a delicate two-step: it’s not a lab report, it’s a scientist’s admission that some phenomena feel too elegant to stay inside the borders of mechanism. He reaches for “supreme power” and “intelligence” not as doctrine, but as a placeholder for the persistent vertigo that comes from studying systems that work without permission from your conscious mind.

The craft here is the move from the cosmic to the intimate. “Behind the whole thing” evokes a designer’s backstage; then he cuts straight to instincts, plants included, widening “intelligence” beyond brains. The kicker is the wound: a cut that closes without deliberation. That example is rhetorically potent because it’s universal without being abstract. It’s embodied proof: your body runs programs you didn’t write and can’t fully audit. His “you don’t have to think about it” is the quiet punchline, implying a hierarchy in which human rationality is late-arriving, maybe overrated.

Context matters: Tombaugh worked in an era when scientific triumphalism coexisted with popular natural theology and, later, Cold War unease about human control. A planetary discoverer invoking instinct is also a subtle rebuke to the idea that scientific explanation automatically drains meaning. The subtext is not anti-evolution so much as anti-complacency: you can map the heavens and still suspect that the deepest intelligence might be the ordinary, automatic miracles under your skin.