Science Quote by Greg Egan

A whole century reframed as a side effect: Greg Egan’s line lands because it’s audaciously reductive in the way a good scientific joke is reductive. It invites you to swap grand narratives - ideology, empire, technology - for a biochemical one: the twentieth century as a civilization running on stimulants, scheduling, and speed. The intent isn’t to literally credit caffeine with world wars or moon landings. It’s to puncture our reverence for “history” as purely ideas and institutions, and to remind us how much modernity is engineered at the level of bodies.

The subtext is about tempo. Caffeine is the unofficial fuel of shift work, bureaucracies, factories, universities, newsrooms: the institutions that made the century feel like acceleration with no off switch. Coffee breaks and cigarette breaks aren’t just habits; they’re micro-rituals that regulate attention, compliance, and productivity. The joke has teeth because caffeine is both liberation and leash: it enables longer hours and sharper focus while quietly normalizing exhaustion as the baseline. Read that way, “explains a lot” hints at the century’s signature mood disorders - jittery optimism, mechanized discipline, chronic stress - as much as its inventions.

Context matters: Egan is a hard-SF writer with a scientist’s sensibility, which means he enjoys explanations that feel like models. By pointing at a mundane psychoactive drug, he’s also skewering our taste for heroic causes. The twentieth century didn’t just believe in progress; it medicated itself to keep up with progress, then mistook the buzz for destiny.