Science Quote by Jack Kilby

Kilby’s line has the offhand modesty of someone who’s already changed the world once and knows better than to predict it twice. He’s talking in the register of engineering time: not prophecy, not hype, but a measured bet placed against a moving target. The phrase “some basically new approach” does the heavy lifting. It’s an admission that incremental improvement has a ceiling, that the reigning paradigm (in Kilby’s era, the relentless shrinking and cheapening of silicon-based integrated circuits) can’t be optimized forever without running into physics, economics, or both.

The subtext is a quiet critique of technological triumphalism. By saying “I would assume,” Kilby distances himself from certainty, signaling the scientific ethic: confidence should be proportional to evidence, and evidence thins out as you peer further down the road. Yet he also smuggles in faith in human ingenuity. “Basically new” isn’t a small tweak; it’s a conceptual pivot - new materials, new architectures, new ways of computing that don’t just extend the curve but redraw it.

Context matters: Kilby helped invent the integrated circuit, a foundational piece of the postwar techno-economic boom. When a figure like that speaks cautiously about disruption, it reads less like hedging and more like respect for complexity. The final clause - “but it’s got a long time” - lands as both reassurance and warning: the dominant system will keep paying dividends, so institutions will keep feeding it, even as the next approach incubates at the margins. This is how technological eras actually end: not with a bang, but with a long overlap.