Science Quote by Martin Fleischmann

Fleischmann’s line is a scientist’s dry rejoinder to a particular kind of lab-status vanity: the reflex that seriousness equals spending. The syntax does the work. He opens with a double negative - “not necessarily true that…not worthwhile” - a careful, almost lawyerly clearing of the throat that signals he’s not anti-ambition. Big science has its place. But the pivot lands hard: “plenty of rather cheap experiments” are “certainly worth doing.” Certainty, here, belongs to the low-cost tests, not the glamorous moonshots.

The subtext is methodological and political at once. Methodological, because cheap experiments are often the cleanest way to collapse a hypothesis quickly: small, decisive probes that save you from building a cathedral to a flawed idea. Political, because budgets shape reputations. In research cultures where prestige rides on large grants, “cheap” can sound like “minor.” Fleischmann flips that hierarchy, hinting that intellectual courage can mean the opposite of scale: running the unsexy control, checking the obvious confound, replicating a result before you rent the cyclotron.

The context sharpens the bite. Fleischmann’s name is inseparable from the cold fusion controversy, a saga where stakes, scrutiny, and spending collided with messy reproducibility. Read through that history, the quote doubles as self-aware advice and quiet critique: if a claim is real, it should survive modest, well-designed attempts to falsify it. If it can’t, no amount of expensive apparatus will buy it into truth.