Time & Perspective Quote by Polykarp Kusch

Kusch’s line tries to pry science out of the lab coat and shove it into the same cultural category as art: not just useful, but generative. Calling science “the greatest creative impulse” is a deliberate reframing of the mid-20th century order of prestige. Creativity, in popular imagination, belonged to painters and poets; science was the cold instrument. Kusch flips that: the real engine of new forms, new metaphors, new ways of living is experimental inquiry.

The subtext is defensive as much as celebratory. A physicist who lived through the century’s most catastrophic proofs of scientific power - world war, the nuclear age, the militarization of research - knows “material things” can read as both miracle and menace. By stressing that science “guides our spirit,” he’s arguing for science as a moral and imaginative discipline, not merely an industrial pipeline. It’s a bid to restore legitimacy: if science shapes the soul as well as the gadget, then scientists aren’t just technicians; they’re custodians of a worldview.

Context matters. Kusch’s career sits in the postwar American research boom, when physics became a public force and a political instrument. In that moment, anxiety about dehumanization ran alongside faith in progress. His rhetoric tries to answer both audiences at once: to the boosters, science “dominates”; to the skeptics, it doesn’t have to flatten meaning. The line quietly insists that the scientific method can be a form of spiritual hygiene - disciplined doubt as an antidote to propaganda, superstition, and ideological certainty.