Science & Tech Quote by Michael Polanyi

Polanyi is picking a fight with the comforting fantasy that matter comes with an instruction manual. The line sounds like a metaphysical provocation, but its real target is a certain kind of scientific swagger: the idea that if you just knew every micro-law and every starting condition, the world would be exhaustively predictable, and higher-level explanations would be mere poetry.

The phrasing is sly. He doesn’t say physics and chemistry are wrong; he says they’re not sufficient to fully determine an inanimate object. That “fully” does heavy lifting. It’s an argument about levels: a screwdriver is made of atoms, yes, but it becomes a screwdriver only inside a human practice of making and using tools. Same molecules, different object. What determines it isn’t just bonds and forces, but constraints, histories, and purposes imposed from above - design, selection, environment, function. Polanyi’s larger project, across his work on tacit knowledge and the “logic of discovery,” is to defend the irreducible role of judgment, skill, and meaning inside science itself, not just in art or ethics.

Context matters: mid-20th century science was riding high on reductionist triumphs, and early cybernetics and information theory were changing how people thought about systems. Polanyi is threading a needle: insisting on the authority of science while refusing the imperial claim that science at the bottom automatically explains everything at the top. The subtext is political, too: resist any worldview that treats humans - and their creations - as merely calculable outcomes of impersonal law.