"In the war, most young men were inducted into the armed forces at the age of 17. A group of students was permitted to attend university before taking part in wartime research projects"
About this Quote
A quiet flex hides inside Pople's plainspoken recollection: in a world where 17-year-olds were being slotted into uniforms, a handful of students were rerouted into lecture halls as a matter of national strategy. The sentence reads bureaucratic, almost bloodless, but that's the point. By using the passive voice ("were inducted", "was permitted"), Pople frames wartime life as a system that assigns destinies, not a sequence of personal choices. It captures how World War II turned youth into a resource to be allocated: bodies to the front, minds to the lab.
The real subtext sits in "permitted". University isn't portrayed as a refuge won by merit or privilege, but as a temporary waiver granted by the state. That word carries both relief and a faint moral unease: education as a reprieve that comes with strings attached. The promise is conditional; you're allowed to study because your studying will be useful. The follow-on clause makes the bargain explicit: the campus isn't an escape from war, it's the war's annex, a staging area for "research projects" that sound innocuous until you remember what wartime research often meant.
Pople, a scientist who helped shape modern computational chemistry, is also sketching the pipeline that built the postwar scientific elite. This is how a generation was forged: accelerated, redirected, and professionalized under crisis. The quote works because it refuses melodrama, letting the machinery of mobilization speak for itself.
The real subtext sits in "permitted". University isn't portrayed as a refuge won by merit or privilege, but as a temporary waiver granted by the state. That word carries both relief and a faint moral unease: education as a reprieve that comes with strings attached. The promise is conditional; you're allowed to study because your studying will be useful. The follow-on clause makes the bargain explicit: the campus isn't an escape from war, it's the war's annex, a staging area for "research projects" that sound innocuous until you remember what wartime research often meant.
Pople, a scientist who helped shape modern computational chemistry, is also sketching the pipeline that built the postwar scientific elite. This is how a generation was forged: accelerated, redirected, and professionalized under crisis. The quote works because it refuses melodrama, letting the machinery of mobilization speak for itself.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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