Science & Tech Quote by Aaron Klug

A single dash and Aaron Klug has already smuggled in an entire class system. The line lands like an offhand recollection, but it cuts with the dry precision of someone who spent a lifetime watching institutions confuse tradition with merit. “Quite simple” is doing heavy lifting: it’s the tone schools use when their sorting mechanisms are anything but simple, when “simple” really means unexamined, inherited, convenient.

The joke turns on a very British hierarchy of subjects. Latin isn’t just a language here; it’s a credential, a proxy for being “bright” in the socially approved way. Science, in this upside-down worldview, becomes the consolation prize for the “not so bright” - an inversion that reads as satire now, but wasn’t entirely absurd in an era when classics signaled gentlemanly polish and science was still fighting for cultural prestige. Geography sits at the bottom as the catch-all for those the system has already stopped expecting things from.

Klug’s intent feels less like bitterness than exposure. By presenting the “philosophy” as a neat tracking scheme, he reveals how education can function as an early gatekeeping apparatus, steering talent toward status rather than substance. Coming from a physicist - and a Nobel-caliber one - the subtext sharpens: the school’s ranking of disciplines is not merely quaint; it is historically myopic. The quiet sting is that the future was being misfiled, and everyone called it common sense.