Education Quote by Robert Millikan

Millikan’s line lands like a dry rebuke to the social theater of “being informed.” For a physicist who built a career on patient measurement and narrow questions asked relentlessly well, the joke has teeth: he defines education not as breadth, polish, or credential, but as sustained attention. Two minutes is a deliberately stingy threshold, the kind you might endure at a dinner party before someone pivots to the next shiny topic. By setting the bar that low, he implies most people fail it anyway.

The intent is less elitist than it first sounds. Millikan isn’t praising the trivia hoarder; he’s praising intellectual stamina: the capacity to stay with an idea long enough to test it, qualify it, defend it, revise it. Conversation becomes a proxy for thinking. If you can’t keep a thread alive past a couple of minutes, it suggests you’re operating on slogans, not understanding.

The subtext also points at a cultural shift already underway in his era: mass media, popular science, and public life rewarding quick takes over deep competence. Millikan’s career straddled the moment when science became both professionalized and public-facing, and he was himself a prolific communicator and institution-builder. That makes the quip read as self-diagnostic as well as judgmental: even experts can be tempted into sound bites.

What makes it work is the smallness of the claim. He doesn’t demand genius, just continuity. In a world where intelligence is often performed as range, Millikan quietly insists it’s also endurance.