Science Quote by Burton Richter

Richter is quietly swatting away the myth of the scientific strongman: the lone director who drags a lab into greatness through sheer force of will. Yes, a director can “get done” what he personally deems important, but the phrasing is deliberately faint praise. It suggests a narrow, controllable definition of success: budgets moved, projects approved, timelines enforced. The real work, Richter implies, is less managerial and more architectural - designing conditions where other people’s intelligence can actually surface.

The subtext is a critique of institutional ego. Big labs, especially in postwar “Big Science” fields like high-energy physics (Richter’s home turf at SLAC), run on collaborations so large that prestige and inertia can bury unconventional ideas. A director who treats the organization as an extension of his own taste will produce orderly mediocrity: efficient execution of yesterday’s priorities. Richter’s “more important job” reframes leadership as a kind of intellectual public service, closer to cultivating an ecosystem than commanding an army.

The line also carries a democratic sting. “Broader scientific community” isn’t just the people on the org chart; it’s outsiders, junior researchers, visiting teams, adjacent disciplines - the folks most likely to notice that the emperor’s model has no clothes. Richter’s intent is practical, not sentimental: breakthroughs are statistically more likely when many smart people can propose, argue, test, and revise. His metric for a director isn’t control. It’s throughput of good ideas.