Science Quote by Walter Kohn

Kohn’s line reads like a modest lab note, but it’s really a snapshot of physics learning to live with consequence. “Radiation damage of Si and Ge” is technical shorthand for a hard truth: the new miracle of semiconductors was also newly fragile. Silicon and germanium weren’t just materials; they were promises - of miniaturized computers, communications, guidance systems. Put them in “outer space,” though, and those promises meet energetic electrons, an invisible weather system that can quietly scramble a device into failure.

The intent is practical, almost defensively so. Kohn isn’t selling wonder; he’s identifying the weak link. That phrase “critical for the use” does a lot of work: it signals that basic research is being pulled into an engineering-and-security pipeline, where “understanding” means “preventing breakdown.” In the early space age, reliability wasn’t a consumer preference; it was mission success, geopolitical credibility, sometimes life and death. His framing treats space not as romance but as a stress test.

The subtext is also about legitimacy. Semiconductors were “recently developed,” still earning trust outside the lab. By anchoring his project to outer space applications, Kohn is locating physics inside the era’s most persuasive funding argument: the frontier. Yet the sentence remains stripped of heroics, a Kohn-like refusal of spectacle. It’s the voice of someone who knows that the future won’t be decided by grand visions alone, but by whether a transistor survives the sky.