Time & Perspective Quote by Richard Ernst

A faint note of regret hides inside this dry, dutiful sentence. Richard Ernst, a scientist whose fame came from sharpening NMR into a precision tool, writes like a man watching his most valuable resource get quietly reallocated. The phrase "more and more" does the emotional heavy lifting: it signals a slow creep, the bureaucratic equivalent of entropy, where obligations expand until they occupy every open space. Nothing dramatic happens; that is the point. Administration wins by accumulation.

Ernst also frames the change as something that has happened to him, not something he chose. "Has become absorbed" turns time into a passive substance being swallowed up, as if paperwork were a solvent. For a researcher, that inversion stings: the mind that once absorbed problems and data is now being absorbed by meetings, budgets, and governance.

The context matters. ETH Zurich is a prestige machine, and research councils are where institutional priorities get translated into funding decisions and career trajectories. Being "presently the president" is both status and trap: leadership confers influence, but it also binds a working scientist to the maintenance of the system that produces science at scale. The subtext is an old tension sharpened by late-20th-century academia: discovery is celebrated, but administration is what keeps the lights on, and the people most capable of guiding science often pay by surrendering the very conditions that made them capable.

He doesn't complain outright. The restraint reads as professional ethics - and as a quiet warning about what modern scientific success demands.