Science Quote by John Polkinghorne

Polkinghorne starts with the intellectual equivalent of a handshake: praise Einstein first, unmistakably, so no one can accuse him of cheap revisionism. The compliment isn’t ornamental; it’s protective gear. By conceding Einstein’s greatness up front, Polkinghorne buys room to question a sacred assumption in modern physics without sounding like a crank or a contrarian theologian (a role he’s often cast in, given his dual career as physicist and Anglican priest).

Then comes the pivot word: “But.” What follows isn’t a technical dispute about relativity; it’s a philosophical diagnosis. “Very committed” frames Einstein’s “objectivity” not as a neutral conclusion but as a deep loyalty - almost a temperament. Subtext: even geniuses don’t just discover; they also choose metaphysical comfort. Einstein’s famous resistance to indeterminacy, his suspicion of quantum randomness, and his quest for an underlying order become, in Polkinghorne’s telling, less about equations than about a worldview: reality as something fully “out there,” cleanly independent of observers, measurement, or participation.

The line works because it’s an insider’s critique delivered with insider manners. Polkinghorne isn’t saying objectivity is wrong; he’s implying it’s partial, and that physics has repeatedly embarrassed the idea that the universe is simply a set of pre-existing facts waiting to be photographed. The context is late-20th-century physics’ uneasy truce with quantum mechanics - and Polkinghorne’s broader project of making space for a universe that is intelligible yet not reducible to a detached, clockwork object.