Science & Tech Quote by Polykarp Kusch

Kusch is quietly pushing back against the heroic myth of science: the lone genius, the eureka moment, the tidy “milestone” that history books can caption. Coming from a working physicist in the mid-20th century, the line reads like an insider’s corrective, aimed as much at the public’s appetite for breakthroughs as at science’s own temptation to canonize a few names and forget the infrastructure of attention beneath them.

The phrasing does the work. “Not only” concedes that milestones matter, then demotes them to “occasional,” a small word that punctures our sense of constant revolution. The real engine, Kusch insists, is “the very large body of men” who “observe and study nature” with “love and devotion.” That last pairing is strategic: it reframes scientific labor as a kind of sustained care, not merely technical competence. He’s elevating the everyday virtues of the lab and the field - patience, fidelity to evidence, willingness to be bored, to repeat, to measure again - as the moral center of knowledge-making.

The subtext is political in the broad sense: science is collective, and its credibility depends on community practices. It’s also a nod to how research actually functions in Kusch’s era of big physics, expanding labs, and institutional funding: progress accrues through countless small acts that rarely look like glory. The dated “men” signals the time and its blind spots, but the argument lands even harder now, in a culture that rewards headline results over replication and treats discovery like content.