Science & Tech Quote by Jacob Bronowski

Bronowski walks straight into the moral crater of Nagasaki and refuses the comfortable script: that science must hang its head for what was done with its discoveries. It is a deliberately abrasive reversal. In the ruins, he argues, science is not the thing that failed; the failure belongs to those who treated scientific power as morally neutral hardware, detachable from the human imagination that produced it.

The phrase "even in the ruins" is doing hard rhetorical work. He’s not speaking from a seminar room; he’s staging an ethical stress test at the worst possible site, where the usual defense of science as pure inquiry sounds obscene. Then he pivots: the shame is "theirs who appeal to other values". That’s a targeted indictment of ideologies that override empathy, curiosity, and the capacity to picture other people’s lives - values he credits science with evolving. Bronowski isn’t claiming laboratories automatically generate virtue; he’s claiming the scientific spirit, at its best, is an imaginative discipline: the habit of revising belief, of respecting evidence, of admitting error. Those are moral practices, not just technical ones.

Context matters. Postwar Britain and the Cold War were saturated with arguments about whether the bomb proved modernity’s bankruptcy. Bronowski, speaking as a scientist with a humanist’s vocabulary, tries to reclaim science from both its apologists (who hide behind inevitability) and its enemies (who treat it as a soulless machine). His subtext is a warning: the true danger isn’t knowledge, it’s the political and religious certainty that can commandeer knowledge while scorning the human imagination that should restrain it.