Science Quote by Arthur Holly Compton

A scientist calling something "absurd" reads like a raised eyebrow in lab-coat form: restrained, almost polite, and still devastating. Arthur Holly Compton isn’t hurling an insult so much as issuing a verdict. The phrase "my first feeling" is doing quiet rhetorical work. It signals reflex, not overthought spin; the reaction is immediate, even bodily. That matters in scientific culture, where you’re trained to distrust gut feeling yet still rely on it as an early warning system when an argument violates basic plausibility.

Then comes the double target: "the paper and the attitude". He’s not just rejecting a set of claims; he’s pushing back against a posture. That pairing hints at a familiar academic pathology: a weak or tendentious argument packaged with unwarranted certainty, moralizing, or intellectual swagger. Compton, a Nobel-winning physicist who helped cement the reality of the photon through the Compton effect, speaks from a world where ideas earn legitimacy by surviving contact with evidence. "Absurd" here isn’t aesthetic; it’s methodological. It’s what you say when a piece of reasoning seems to ignore constraints everyone in the room is supposed to respect.

Contextually, Compton lived through decades when physics was rewriting common sense (quantum mechanics, relativity) and when science was entangled with public persuasion (wartime research, institutional politics). That makes the line sharper: it’s a reminder that radical new ideas aren’t automatically absurd, but they do have to be argued with discipline. The subtext is a defense of standards - and a warning that tone can be as revealing as data.