> to justify large investment it needs to yield something useful in practice The really important scientific work doesn't follow this rule and demanding it doe

> to justify large investment it needs to yield something useful in practice The really important scientific work doesn't follow this rule and demanding it does is short-sighted. Perhaps worse, it's refusing to learn from plenty of historical examples where you can see the work yielded nothing of immediate use but was still very important (that is to say, society would look vastly different without it). In a sense, it's this kind of goal-oriented thinking that led society to the mess that it has become in the last 15 years.