Science Quote by Eric Allin Cornell

There’s a quiet swagger in “I was partly old-fashioned and partly modern,” the kind of line a scientist drops when he wants to demystify genius without pretending discovery is accidental. Coming from Eric Allin Cornell, a physicist whose work helped usher Bose-Einstein condensates from theoretical elegance into laboratory fact, the sentence reads like a small manifesto about method: keep one hand on the tried-and-true, and use the other to reach for what hasn’t been built yet.

The intent is less about personal style than about intellectual posture. “Old-fashioned” signals craft: patience at the bench, respect for fundamentals, a willingness to do things the slow way if that’s what produces clean evidence. “Modern” signals tool-making and risk tolerance: new apparatus, new computational habits, new ways of collaborating and publishing in a field that moves fast when the instrumentation finally catches up to the ideas.

The subtext is a rebuttal to two lazy myths at once: that breakthrough science is either dusty tradition or pure disruption. Cornell’s phrasing implies that progress is often a hybrid temperament, not a single ideology. It also carries a professional wink: in physics, being “modern” can mean chasing fashionable questions; being “old-fashioned” can mean refusing to oversell results. The line stakes out a middle ground that’s both strategic and ethical.

Context matters here because late-20th-century physics rewarded precisely this duality: theory and experiment tightening their feedback loop, precision measurement becoming its own kind of frontier, and careers being made by people who could honor the canon while hacking the lab into the future.