Science Quote by Walther Bothe

A physicist’s driest sentence can still be a small act of persuasion. Bothe’s “This result was confirmed by different researchers using various experimental arrangements” isn’t trying to dazzle; it’s trying to survive. In early 20th-century physics, spectacular claims were everywhere, but so were artifacts, leaky apparatuses, and theoretical fashions that could outrun the data. So Bothe leans on a particular kind of authority: not his own reputation, but the social machinery of science doing its job.

The key move is the plural. “Different researchers” signals independence, a hedge against the suspicion that a finding is an idiosyncrasy of one lab’s habits, one person’s expectations, or one group’s incentives. “Various experimental arrangements” tightens the claim further: it’s not merely replicated, it’s robust across setups, which implies the effect is in nature rather than in the wiring. The sentence is quietly anti-charismatic. It downplays the romance of discovery and replaces it with a protocol: trust this because it resists being broken.

Context matters. Bothe worked in an era when new tools (coincidence methods, radiation detection) were reshaping what could be claimed about the microscopic world. Those methods were powerful but easy to doubt if they looked like technical magic tricks. The line reads like a passport stamp for a result entering the canon: not “believe me,” but “try to kill it; others did, and it lived.” Subtext: physics isn’t advanced by boldness alone, but by findings that keep reappearing when no one is trying to be impressed.