Time & Perspective Quote by Albert Claude

Progress, in Albert Claude's telling, is a relay race where every baton gets dropped on purpose. By lining up Ptolemy and Plato with Newton and Einstein, he compresses centuries of intellectual authority into a single, unsettling idea: what we call "truth" is often just the current best scaffold, destined to be dismantled by the next generation. The cadence matters. "Once...yesterday...today...tomorrow" turns the history of science into a calendar, not a monument. It makes certainty feel temporary, almost seasonal.

Claude writes as a scientist who lived through the 20th century's violent upgrades in worldview: relativity, quantum mechanics, molecular biology, the retooling of medicine and industry, the collapse of old political theologies and the rise of new ones. His own work in cell biology (helping invent modern cell fractionation) sits inside that same pattern: new instruments, new partitions of reality, new invisible worlds made legible. So when he says "new dimensions", he isn't only flirting with physics. He's pointing at the way technology and method expand what counts as real.

The sly twist is the phrase "new faiths, new beliefs" placed right beside Einstein. Claude blurs the boundary between scientific paradigms and belief systems, not to sneer at science but to warn against turning it into a church. The subtext is humility with teeth: today's consensus can become tomorrow's superstition if we cling to it like identity.