Science & Tech Quote by Polykarp Kusch

Kusch’s sentence reads like a victory lap, but it’s also a quiet warning about what scientists were newly being asked to justify in the mid-20th century: not just knowledge, but power. Coming from a physicist whose career ran through the era of radar, nuclear weapons, and postwar “big science,” the line carries the optimism of expanding measurement and mastery, while conceding the new, unsettling fact that the laboratory had become a lever on the world.

The key move is his pairing of “knowledge and understanding” with “magnificent opportunity…to control and use.” That’s not the old Enlightenment promise that truth ennobles; it’s the modern bargain that truth operationalizes. “Control” is doing heavy lifting here, softened by the almost disarmingly human phrase “extension of our pleasure in it.” Kusch frames scientific progress as an upgrade to lived experience, not an abstract accumulation of facts. It’s rhetorical triage: pleasure sounds harmless, even generous, and it steers the reader away from the darker applications that made “control” politically radioactive.

The subtext is that scientific authority now needs a public-facing moral narrative. In the Cold War context, research funding and national prestige were welded together, and “opportunity” implied obligation: if we can reshape nature, we will be pressured to. Kusch’s intent isn’t to brag about gadgets; it’s to claim that science’s expanding reach can still be defended in everyday terms - as a means to broaden what it feels like to inhabit the world, even as that reach makes the question of who gets to “use” it unavoidable.