Science & Tech Quote by John Polkinghorne

Polkinghorne is doing something quietly subversive here: using science not as a badge of certainty, but as a discipline of intellectual humility. Coming from a working physicist (and one who later became a theologian), the line reads less like wonder-struck poetry and more like a corrective to the popular myth that science steadily sandpapers reality into common sense. His “very strange and surprising” isn’t a quirky aside; it’s the point. The universe has repeatedly refused to stay within the boundaries of what feels intuitive to human brains built for mid-sized objects and everyday speeds.

The phrase “the experience of science” matters. He’s not appealing to scientific “facts” as a static library. He’s appealing to the historical practice: messy, revisionary, occasionally humiliating. Revolutions are his evidence. In physics alone, the greatest hits are an embarrassment of overturned expectations: Newtonian certainty destabilized by relativity; classical continuity punctured by quantum jumps; empty space revealed as structured and active. Each “revolution” didn’t just add details; it changed the rules of what counts as an explanation.

There’s also a subtle jab at cultural scientism: the posture that science licenses overconfidence about what reality must be like. Polkinghorne’s intent is to remind us that the most scientific stance is often the least complacent. If science has a moral, it’s not that the world is simple and we are masters of it, but that nature keeps outsmarting our metaphors, and progress looks a lot like learning to live with astonishment.