For a great reply to this, read the chapter "Maxwell and the Nerds" in Carl Sagan's "Demon-Haunted World". We can never do a good job guessing what eventual en

For a great reply to this, read the chapter "Maxwell and the Nerds" in Carl Sagan's "Demon-Haunted World". We can never do a good job guessing what eventual engineering applications will emerge from researching the frontiers of physics, which at each stage seems like the most uselessly esoteric pursuit possible. But we've been through this enough to know that the eventual applications are way more awesome than we could have guessed. Maybe we can revisit the subject in thirty years on a weekend trip to the Moon on a spaceship powered by feeding dust into a micro black hole and rendered almost massless with a Higgs field damper.