Science & Tech Quote by Polykarp Kusch

Science, Kusch suggests, can turn into a kind of high-tech stamp collecting: exquisitely precise, socially weightless, and quietly dangerous in its naivete. Coming from a working physicist, the line lands less like a humanities scold than an insider’s warning about what happens when expertise forgets it lives among people, institutions, money, and power.

The key word is "sterile" - not "wrong", not "useless", but unable to generate life. He’s pointing at a failure mode where science keeps producing results yet loses its capacity to matter: questions get chosen because they’re fundable or fashionable, not because they illuminate the world; methods become rituals; "objectivity" becomes a shield against responsibility. The subtext is that knowledge is never produced in a vacuum, even when the lab is literally vacuum-sealed. Scientific facts emerge from a culture: peer review norms, military priorities, industrial patronage, national prestige, and the values of the people who get to call something "important."

Kusch’s era makes the warning sharper. A Nobel-winning physicist who lived through the wartime mobilization of research and the Cold War’s big-science pipeline, he’s writing in the shadow of the atomic age, when scientific brilliance proved compatible with catastrophic outcomes. The second clause - "in which the fruits of science are used" - is the moral hinge: discovery doesn’t end at publication. It ripens into policy, surveillance, medicine, weapons, profit. Kusch isn’t anti-science; he’s arguing for science with civic literacy, ethical imagination, and historical memory, so precision doesn’t become an alibi.