More than once people have asked me what good is my research for. This is one of the most common questions that is first and foremost in the mind of the general public. Not surprisingly, it is one of the most difficult questions to answer. This is especially true for fundamental research (as opposed to applied / technological research).
For example, if you are working on anticancer medications, not a lot of explanation is needed for you to see why this research is useful. The same applies to let’s say, engineering; for example if you want to build better bridges, or to come up with better electrical circuits, or to improve manufacturing practices, etc.
But, why study…
Flowers?
Polar bears?
Lichens?
Worms?
Etc…
In these cases this question is a little more difficult to answer, because in a real sense, one does not know the potential usefulness of apparently trivial information. A very readable article with some reasons why fundamental science is valuable can be found here, but in this post, I will try to illustrate my opinion of this matter with an example.
Let’s think of the wealth of all of the knowledge humans have about nature as a big pyramid, say, the Great Pyramid of Giza. This is a BIG structure, made of about 2,300,000 blocks of granite or limestone, with an average weight of 1,000 kilograms (1 metric ton; some people say a little bit some and some a little bit less).
Now let’s suppose that an “unit of knowledge” (like some data, a scientific paper, etc.) is equivalent to a grain of sand. Just how many grains of sand may fit in the great pyramid?
Easy.
An average grain of sand weights about 50 millionths of a gram (50 micrograms). If we have 2,300,000 blocks at 1000 kilograms a piece we get: 2,300,000 x 1,000,000,000 ug = 2,300,000,000,000,000 ugrams of sand.
If we divide this number by 50 micrograms/grain of sand we get 46,000,000,000,000 grains of sand, or in our example, 46,000,000,000,000 units of knowledge.
Please check my math, but in any case, that’s a lot of knowledge, dontcha think?
Some of these units are at the base, some at the sides, some at the insides and one, just one, is at the very tip of the pyramid, right on the capstone. This position represents the most useful piece of knowledge at any particular time under a specific circumstance.
But this is a special kind of pyramid, you know, it is a fluid pyramid. The position of each grain of sand changes unpredictably, allowing for different grains of sand to occupy the capstone position at various times in history.
Interesting, huh?
The catch is that one never knows what triggers this shift in position. We can’t control it either and to make things worse, nobody knows exactly what grain of sand needs to be at the very top in a given particular moment in history.
Imagine the sand flowing, the forms shifting, until the pyramid is reorganized. Sometimes, there are defective grains of sand, which we discover that they apparently don’t fit anywhere anymore in the great scheme of things, and are therefore discarded. They may come back to the piramid, but they may not. This happens non stop throughout history.
All the possible grains of sand that may form the pyramid of the knowledge of nature are brought by very special bricklayers, microbricklayers if you will, who are called fundamental or basic scientists.
Each of us scientists contribute discrete, small pieces of knowledge to the world. Each of these microbricks is a unit of knowledge as described above. Some microbricklayers add more grains of sand than others, some care more than others, but we all contribute nonetheless. However, in most cases we microbricklayers have no idea if, how, or when any of the grains of sand that we labor so hard to produce will ever be useful.
One thing is for sure, just as there are no inconsequential microbricklayers, there are NO inconsequential scientists, because as we said before, we are not sure of the relative importance of any discovery, of any particular grain of sand. For example:
Mendel and his pea plants. He had no idea, he couldn’t have the foggiest notion of how his gardening experiments would be at the uppermost microbrick of the pyramid’s capstone some 100 years later. And I am talking of course, of the beginnings of the genetics revolution, a revolution still very much alive.
Now let’s think of Einstein’s 1905 annus mirabilis. His discoveries then were instrumental some fifty-odd years later for satellite technology, nuclear energy, etc., and they still keep giving us useful contraptions. For Einstein everything began with thought experiments, pretty much “advanced daydreaming” if you will.
How about Marie Curie and her discovery of radioactivity?… Need I say more?
And what about all the pioneers of quantum mechanics? This was a mere curiosity at the time but it is now the basis for the ubiquitous electronic technologies, and more surprisingly, QM is being described as a fundamental property of life itself…
A word on Benoit Mandelbrot and his Fractals. Fractals were another mathematical curiosity at its birth, later found applications from weather patterns to the rythm of our hearts…
There are many more examples of units of knowledge knowledge whose importance was not recognized when originally discovered. How long will it be until the pyramid starts flowing again, maybe in our lifetime? What unexpected, seemingly useless discoveries will migrate to the capstone?
While that happens, all of us, lonely microbricklayers, keep working, keep adding knowledge to the pyramid, and keep learning…
Credit: Wikimedia Commons
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