Time & Perspective Quote by Burton Richter

Richter’s sentence reads like a retirement update, but it’s really a quiet manifesto about what scientific authority is for. The first clause establishes a pivot: the lab-director era is over, the institutional power badge set aside. Then comes the key rhetorical move: he doesn’t say he’s “retired” into private life; he reallocates his attention toward “international issues,” widening the arena from the controlled world of experiments to the messy, diplomatic world where evidence competes with ideology, industry, and national interest.

The subtext is a scientist insisting that the climate-and-energy problem is no longer a niche research topic but a systems-level emergency. “Increasing fraction of my time” signals a deliberate reprioritization, almost like a personal budget: less prestige-driven physics, more consequence-driven public work. It also subtly defends intervention. Scientists are often told to stay in their lane; Richter’s phrasing implies the lane has expanded because the stakes have expanded.

Context matters. Stepping down in 1999 places this before climate politics hardened into today’s culture war, but after greenhouse gases had already become a central scientific concern. Richter, a Nobel-winning physicist and former SLAC director, is leveraging credibility earned in fundamental science to argue for applied outcomes: “new energy sources free of greenhouse gases.” The specificity is doing work. He’s not gesturing at “green” feelings or vague sustainability; he’s pointing to technological transformation as the only serious response. The tone is restrained, almost bureaucratic, which makes the message sharper: this isn’t activism as identity, it’s duty as arithmetic.