Science Quote by Polykarp Kusch

Kusch’s line is doing something sly: it sells science not as a toolbox, but as a temperament. “Truth and beauty” is the old two-step of scientific romance, but he’s not praising flashy breakthroughs; he’s pitching a daily discipline of attention. The phrasing “fills each day” nudges wonder away from the once-in-a-lifetime eureka and toward an outlook you can practice, like a kind of secular devotion.

The subtext is a rebuttal to a familiar complaint: that science disenchants the world. Kusch flips that script. He implies that explanation doesn’t drain mystery; it refines it. “Fresh wonder” is a quiet jab at cynicism and at the idea that knowledge makes everything routine. The wonder is “fresh” precisely because the more you understand, the more intricate the questions become.

Then there’s the loaded phrase “exquisite order.” Coming from a 20th-century physicist (and Nobel laureate in experimental physics), “order” isn’t a sermon about cosmic purpose so much as an aesthetic stance toward lawfulness: patterns you can test, quantify, and still find moving. Yet “governs our world” carries a near-theological cadence. In the Cold War era, when science was both salvation (medicine, technology) and threat (nuclear weapons), framing science as a source of beauty and moral uplift is also reputational work: an attempt to associate the laboratory with wonder rather than domination.

The intent, ultimately, is persuasion by enchantment. Kusch invites the public to see scientific thinking as a way of living inside reality more fully, not hovering above it.