Science Quote by Richard Ernst

It reads like a clean break, but the real charge is in the adverb: "thus". Ernst isn’t dramatizing a youthful tantrum; he’s presenting a decision as the logical endpoint of accumulated frustration. That scientist’s diction matters. "Thus" signals a mind trained to turn messy institutional experience into cause-and-effect, to make a personal rupture sound like an inevitable conclusion.

The sentence also carries a quiet provocation: leaving "the university forever" is not framed as failure or exile, but as agency. In the postwar mid-century world Ernst came up in, universities were gatekeepers of prestige, while industry (especially in the United States) was where new instruments, funding, and scale were rapidly reshaping research. His intent is pragmatic: if academia can’t support the kind of work he wants to do, he’ll go where the machinery is. The subtext is sharper: universities can be conservative, slow, and status-bound; innovation sometimes needs the unromantic infrastructure of corporate labs.

"Industrial job" lands with deliberate plainness. He doesn’t say "research appointment" or "fellowship". He chooses the term that academics often say with a hint of disdain, and neutralizes it. The U.S. functions as shorthand for a research economy less tethered to old hierarchies, where talent can convert into opportunity.

Coming from a scientist who later became central to modern NMR, the line also reads as a reminder that major intellectual advances are often routed through career detours, institutional mismatches, and the willingness to abandon the approved path. The drama is understated, but the critique is loud.