Happiness Quote by Henry Taube

Taube frames science as a two-currency economy: private exhilaration and public validation. The first is visceral, almost childlike - “joy of discovery” treats research less like a job than a sustained encounter with surprise. By insisting it is “real,” he’s pushing back against a common suspicion that scientists are motivated primarily by grant money, prestige, or cold utility. Discovery, in his telling, pays in a kind of internal electricity that can’t be faked, and it’s “one of our rewards” precisely because the work itself is so often slow, failure-heavy, and indifferent to effort.

Then he pivots, with a sober little “So too,” to the second reward: “approval...by our peers.” It’s a modest phrase that smuggles in the entire machinery of modern science - referees, replication, seminars, citations, prizes. Taube doesn’t romanticize the lone genius; he locates legitimacy in a community trained to be hard to please. The subtext is both flattering and disciplinary: your excitement isn’t enough. A result becomes science only when it survives the stress test of other experts who are incentivized to find the cracks.

Context matters here: Taube, a Nobel-winning chemist whose work helped explain electron transfer, lived in an era when big labs and peer review solidified as the gatekeepers of credibility. He’s naming the bargain: endure the grind for moments of genuine revelation, then submit those moments to collective skepticism. The line reads like a quiet ethic for researchers - chase wonder, but accept judgment.