Science & Tech Quote by Friedrich Durrenmatt

Durrenmatt rigs the sentence like a trap: it starts as sober diagnosis and ends as metaphysical black comedy. “Our science has become terrible” doesn’t indict curiosity; it indicts the grown-up version of curiosity, the kind that no longer gets to pretend it’s innocent. The triad “terrible / dangerous / deadly” tightens the screws with a prosecutor’s rhythm, each adjective escalating the charge until “findings” - usually a neutral, lab-coat word - turns into a murder weapon.

The real twist is the swagger disguised as resignation. “We physicists have to make peace with reality” sounds like humility, but it’s immediately undercut: “Reality is not as strong as we are.” That’s Durrenmatt’s signature irony: the scientist as both tragic hero and petty bureaucrat of apocalypse, shrugging while holding the detonator. He’s not warning that reality will punish human hubris; he’s saying the punishment has been outsourced to humans. Nature isn’t the avenger anymore. We are.

Context matters: a postwar European writer looking at physics after Hiroshima, when theoretical elegance suddenly had a blast radius. Durrenmatt, steeped in moral paradox and theatrical cruelty, spots the new imbalance of power: knowledge has escaped the ethics that used to leash it. “We will ruin reality” is deliberately absurd - reality, by definition, should be unruinable - and that’s the point. Modern science doesn’t just change the world; it changes what counts as “the world” by making extinction, annihilation, and irreversible transformation plausible human choices.