Science Quote by Johannes Stark

There’s a quiet power move in Stark’s phrasing: he frames a technical problem as an inheritance. By invoking “the ancient Greeks,” he’s not doing a casual history nod; he’s claiming pedigree. The question at hand - what perceptible objects are “made of” - becomes less a modern lab puzzle than a perennial, almost civilizational obsession. That move matters because it flatters the enterprise of physics as something deeper than instrumentation: a continuation of a long argument about reality itself.

The wording is telling. “Composition” points to reductionism: the hope that the messy world of appearances can be decomposed into cleaner, underlying parts. “Perceptible objects” keeps one foot in everyday experience, a reminder that physics isn’t just about abstract entities but about explaining the table, the flame, the sky. Yet the phrase also smuggles in a philosophical tension the Greeks grappled with: perception can mislead. The subtext is that to understand objects, you may need to distrust the senses that first define them.

Context sharpens the intent. Stark worked through an era when atoms, electrons, and quantum theory were reshaping what “object” could even mean. By anchoring modern physics to Greek speculation, he smooths over the rupture: the discontinuity between armchair metaphysics and experimental, mathematically formal science. It’s a legitimizing gesture - and a reminder that today’s breakthroughs still echo yesterday’s questions, even when the answers arrive by spectrometer instead of syllogism.