Science & Tech Quote by Polykarp Kusch

A century doesn’t just get named by its inventions; it gets claimed by the kind of authority people trust. When Polykarp Kusch calls his era “the century of science” and, more pointedly, “the century of physics,” he’s staking out a cultural power shift: from moral philosophy and political ideology toward laboratories, instruments, and equations as the engine of prestige and policy.

The hedging is the tell. “I think” and “perhaps” aren’t modesty tics; they’re a scientist’s rhetorical checksum, a way of signaling intellectual discipline while still making a sweeping historical argument. Physics, in particular, earns the upgrade because the 20th century made it feel like the master key to reality. Quantum mechanics and relativity didn’t merely revise textbooks; they rearranged common sense. And physics didn’t stay in the seminar room. It detonated in geopolitics (the bomb), reorganized economies (electronics, telecommunications), and rewrote the texture of daily life (computing, medical imaging). Calling it the century of physics is also a quiet nod to funding, institutional clout, and the postwar idea that national survival could depend on who had the better theoretical physicists.

Kusch’s context matters: a Nobel-winning physicist working in an age when “basic research” became a strategic asset and physics sat at the top of the scientific pecking order. The line carries a subtle self-justification: if physics defines the century, physicists are not just specialists but stewards of modernity. The subtext is both triumphal and uneasy: the same discipline that explains the universe also builds the levers that can break it.