Science Quote by John Bardeen

“Science is a field which grows continuously with ever expanding frontiers” reads like modesty, but from John Bardeen it lands as lived fact. Bardeen isn’t a quote-machine celebrity; he’s the rare scientist who won two Nobel Prizes in physics, first for the transistor and later for superconductivity theory. When someone that foundational calls science “ever expanding,” he’s not selling optimism. He’s describing the professional vertigo of doing work that reorganizes the map.

The wording is doing quiet rhetorical labor. “Field” suggests something coherent and cultivable, not an arcane priesthood. Yet “frontiers” smuggles in risk, migration, and the permanent incompleteness of the project. Frontiers are where rules thin out and surprises happen; they also imply politics: who gets to explore, who funds the expedition, who benefits from the new territory. Bardeen’s line avoids triumphalism, but it refuses the comforting idea that knowledge stabilizes into a finished encyclopedia.

Context matters: Bardeen’s career sits in the mid-century moment when physics moved from blackboards into institutions that could change everyday life (Bell Labs, Cold War research funding, the marriage of theory and engineering). The subtext is a defense of basic research against the demand for immediate payoff. If science is defined by continuously expanding edges, then uncertainty isn’t a bug; it’s the engine. The quote works because it normalizes the endlessness of inquiry while reminding us that progress isn’t linear closure, but a widening horizon that keeps receding as we walk toward it.