"When the honour is given to that scientist personally the happiness is sweet indeed. Science is, on the whole, an informal activity, a life of shirt sleeves and coffee served in beakers"
About this Quote
Porter slips a needle under the ceremonial balloon of scientific prestige and lets it deflate with a smile. Yes, he admits, personal recognition feels "sweet indeed" - the line carries the unembarrassed pleasure of someone who knows awards matter, even to people trained to distrust vanity. Then he pivots to the real point: science, for all the medals and formal citations, is mostly built in conditions that are stubbornly unglamorous.
"An informal activity" is doing double duty here. It describes the literal look of the lab - shirt sleeves, improvised tools, coffee in beakers - but it also signals a moral claim about how knowledge gets made: through messy iteration, argument, and tinkering rather than through tidy pronouncements. The beaker-coffee image is not just cute; its mild impropriety (that glassware is not for drinking) hints at the everyday rule-bending that powers discovery. Innovation often comes from people who are too busy chasing a result to curate a brand.
The context matters. Porter, a Nobel-winning chemist, lived through the postwar expansion of "Big Science", when research became more bureaucratic, more institutional, more bound up with national funding and public spectacle. Against that backdrop, his nostalgia for the shirt-sleeve culture reads as a quiet defense of the lab as workshop rather than stage. The subtext is a warning: honor can be intoxicating, but the engine of science is still informal human labor - caffeinated, collaborative, and occasionally a little unsafe.
"An informal activity" is doing double duty here. It describes the literal look of the lab - shirt sleeves, improvised tools, coffee in beakers - but it also signals a moral claim about how knowledge gets made: through messy iteration, argument, and tinkering rather than through tidy pronouncements. The beaker-coffee image is not just cute; its mild impropriety (that glassware is not for drinking) hints at the everyday rule-bending that powers discovery. Innovation often comes from people who are too busy chasing a result to curate a brand.
The context matters. Porter, a Nobel-winning chemist, lived through the postwar expansion of "Big Science", when research became more bureaucratic, more institutional, more bound up with national funding and public spectacle. Against that backdrop, his nostalgia for the shirt-sleeve culture reads as a quiet defense of the lab as workshop rather than stage. The subtext is a warning: honor can be intoxicating, but the engine of science is still informal human labor - caffeinated, collaborative, and occasionally a little unsafe.
Quote Details
| Topic | Science |
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