on basic research

“It’s of no use whatsoever. This is just an experiment that proves Maestro Maxwell was right - we just have these mysterious electromagnetic waves that we cannot see with the naked eye, but they are there.”

– Heinrich Hertz,
when asked about the use of his experimental demonstration of electromagnetic waves. Yet, the modern world of technology, including the little electronci device which you may be reading this on, is built on Maxwell and Hertz’ “useless” research

Our primary focus is basic research (also called fundamental research), which is driven by curiosity and aimed at gaining knowledge of nature. We are frequently asked to justify the value of such work. This is analogous to evaluating education by the money students make afterwards. It is impossible to predict what value a piece of knowledge will bring in the future. True research is about going after the unknown, and as Albert Einstein had put it “If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?”

However, that hardly convinces the skeptics. Much has been written about the value of basic research, so instead of repeating these arguments, here is a list of articles on this topic:

• If you are here, you probably think value = $$$. To avoid wasting your valuable time, here are two estimations of monetary value of basic research:
  • A 1979 article
  • A blog post from International Monetary Fund (IMF)

If you have a little more time to read, and are looking for broader discussions:

• Post by Andrew Ng, a great teacher and one of the leaders in the AI/ML field, expressing concern over funding cut on basic research.

• What is value? Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Intrinsic and extrinsic value

• A reddit post summarizing a lot of history and other sources

• A piece in Symmetry magazine, in which Stefano Forte, a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Milan, is quoted about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC): “The main goal is priceless and therefore has no price attached.”

• The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge: A piece from Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton (this was the academic home of people like Albert Einstein, Kurt Goedel, John von Neumann, and Robert Oppenheimer) revisiting an essay by their founding director in 1939.

• The White House on the value of basic research

• A piece from Harvard University

• The National Science Foundation (NSF), USA, 1953 Annual Report

• A piece in MIT’s Spectrum magazine

• An editorial in Nature

• A list at CERN (this is where the world wide web was created - to support basic research in Physics)