Science & Tech Quote by Abdus Salam

Salam’s line quietly refuses the triumphalist storyline that science is a straight, ever-upward climb from superstition to enlightenment. By framing scientific progress as cyclical, he pulls science down from its pedestal and plants it inside the same messy terrain as “all civilization”: politics, patronage, war, theology, institutions, and collective confidence. The intent isn’t to deny breakthroughs; it’s to warn that knowledge is fragile, contingent, and periodically mislaid.

The subtext is pointed if you place Salam’s life behind it. A Pakistani Nobel laureate who championed scientific development in the Global South, Salam watched how quickly nations can treat research as a luxury item, how brain drain hollows out labs, how ideology can outvote expertise, and how prestige concentrates in a few capitals. “Cycles” hints at golden ages that are less about innate genius than about conditions that let genius compound: stable funding, intellectual openness, and networks that transmit ideas. When those conditions collapse, science doesn’t just slow down; it can get provincial, repetitive, or quietly censored.

There’s also a corrective here to Western self-mythology. The history of science includes long arcs of translation, inheritance, and revival - Greek texts carried through Arabic scholarship, European renaissances built on recovered archives, modern physics shaped by migrants and exiles. Salam’s rhetoric compresses that history into a single sober comparison: science rises when civilizations invest in curiosity and institutions; it falls when they choose certainty, austerity, or spectacle. The sentence lands because it sounds calm while delivering a hard political diagnosis.