E.g., enjoy your life-saving MRI? Thank research physicists. An often quoted figure, or range of figures, is that the U.S. space program has, per dollar inves

E.g., enjoy your life-saving MRI? Thank research physicists. An often quoted figure, or range of figures, is that the U.S. space program has, per dollar invested, produced between 5 and 10 dollars of returns in commercial technology. I don't mean rockets and such. I mean things used in the everyday world around us. Oh, and a bit further afield from traditional physics, most of the novel drug discovery in the U.S. is developed with public dollars, not pharmaceutical dollars. Pharmaceutical companies convert (some) discoveries to commercial products, spending more money on later series trials and on marketing, than on any original research. And, many drugs were the results of "mistakes". Not what the researchers were targeting. You do research to learn novel things. If you already knew what your result would be, well... (I could jest, then you'd be a theoretician.) P.S. Let me also put it this way: You do research also to learn how to learn those things. Building new equipment, procedures, and understanding. And a lot of those pay off repeatedly, regardless of the particular result of the original research topic.