Science Quote by John Charles Polanyi

Science, in Polanyi's telling, is less a cathedral of facts than a permanently unfinished construction site. The line works because it flips a common public expectation: that science is valuable only when it delivers certainty. Instead, Polanyi frames science's authority as a disciplined refusal to declare victory. Its power comes from a built-in humility that is procedural, not sentimental: hypotheses are provisional, results are contingent, and even celebrated "laws" are only as strong as the next experiment that tries to break them.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke to two audiences at once. To the anti-science skeptic, it says: your demand for absolute proof is a category error; the point isn't final truth, it's reliable methods for approaching it. To the pro-science partisan, it warns against treating science as a brand of infallibility. When institutions or spokespeople overpromise certainty, they don't strengthen trust - they manufacture the very backlash that will later be framed as "distrust in science". Polanyi is defending a more mature social contract: trust the process, not the pose.

Context matters here: Polanyi, a Nobel-winning chemist, speaks from the culture of peer review, replication, and revision - systems designed to keep ego from hardening into doctrine. In an era of policy fights over climate, medicine, and technology, the quote doubles as a political ethics statement. Science earns legitimacy precisely by leaving room to be wrong, which is another way of saying it leaves room to learn.