Science Quote by Walther Bothe

A small line in a technical argument, it still carries the quiet swagger of a field deciding what “modern” will mean. Bothe isn’t praising Rossi for elegance alone; he’s marking a turning point in how physicists learned to trust their instruments. “Valves in parallel” points to the early electronics of particle detection, when vacuum tubes were the logic gates of the lab. The real claim sits in the phrase “extended to coincidences between more than two events.” Coincidence circuitry wasn’t just a clever wiring trick; it was a way to make nature speak more selectively. If two detectors fire at once, you can start to believe you’ve caught a real particle event rather than noise. If three or more agree, belief hardens into method.

The subtext is institutional: the winning technologies in science are the ones that scale. Bothe is naming scalability as epistemology. A device that “can easily be extended” doesn’t merely save time; it changes what questions are askable, letting experiments move from anecdotal flashes to statistically defensible patterns. That’s why the final clause lands with such authority: “predominantly used today.” It’s not a neutral observation. It’s a verdict that the community has standardized around a particular way of filtering reality.

Context matters here: Bothe helped pioneer coincidence methods himself, and the interwar race to measure cosmic rays and nuclear processes depended on separating rare signals from overwhelming background. His sentence reads like a footnote, but it’s also a snapshot of scientific power: credit assigned, technique canonized, and a definition of rigor quietly rewritten in hardware.