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When science isn't driven at least in part by problem solving, there's a tendency to wander off into interesting but arcane fields with little potential for app
by joshrule 16y ago
When science isn't driven at least in part by problem solving, there's a tendency to wander off into interesting but arcane fields with little potential for application any time soon.
You can argue that eventually all science will be useful somehow or that as long as someone finds it interesting, it doesn't really matter. But, it seems a waste for brilliant minds to pursue largely irrelevant questions when they could dramatically make the world a better place now just by shifting their interests a bit.
- dasil003 16y agoI strongly disagree with this. Consider astrophysics and the work that is being done on the big questions. It's unclear how to apply most of the progress being made in these fields, but yet the understanding of these things has the potential to affect everything. If it takes 1000 years, it still might mean more fundamentally than all the intermediate applied science funded by companies for short-term profit.
- lnguyen 16y agoYou need a mix of practical (short-term) and seemingly impractical (long-term). The former drives the evolution of current ideas while the latter leads to completely new ones. And don't easily dismiss the "interesting but arcane fields". In and of themselves, they may hold no direct applications but how you go about the research does. Think searching for the Higgs boson and the construction of the LHC.