> I feel bad that there is always the request for potential applications for studies like this, and the scientists feel required to come up with something. The

> I feel bad that there is always the request for potential applications for studies like this, and the scientists feel required to come up with something. The request of “but what is the application for this” often comes from those outside the field who don't understand. Sometimes it is the selfish human nature question “yeah, but why should I care?” with different wording to try to make it look like the asker cares about a wider community. Sometimes it is a genuine question: they are intrigued by the base idea and want to know more about where it might later develop. Often there is already an application, or a potential application. In fact sometimes this is explicitly written into the paper, but people haven't bothered to read it (or didn't understand it) and are just reacting to a headline report. For instance studies on how cereals settle in transit and how they absorb available liquid, why the bigger parts end up at the top and so forth, are favourites of “silly research” lists but can have importance for the safe transport & storage of many other things that are in particulate or powder form. Some of this sort of work has fed into understanding a very real problem causing ships carrying such cargo to roll over and break and/or sink in choppy seas (endangering lives & the environment and, what commercial sponsors of such research care about, costing money). > Can we just find out the answer in order to find out the answer? We definitely should be able to, and thankfully some do. There are a lot of results in maths over the centuries that were just curiosities at the time but then later became important to a larger problem sometimes quite unrelated to the original thought space. Though even for things that may never find a real world use, the process itself will have helped train and/or the minds of the people looking at it so has value through that.