Are there any major avenues of scientific research that have no foreseeable commercial application whatsoever, even as a remote side benefit? Or might we one day incorporate some side discovery of string theory into our GPS devices (or something)?
What do you mean by major?
I would say “No,” depending on your definition of “side benefit.” All research has paid off commercially in some fashion, somewhere down the line, even if it was “We learned how not to do something.”
I suppose anything that’d get into a respected peer-reviewed journal and enjoys funding at a well-known university?
I don’t think anyone foresees any commercial application to most of cosmology, and you have to really stretch to see any commercial application to modern particle physics. But that doesn’t mean that they won’t ever have practical application, just that we don’t know what it is yet.
No, unless it directly leads to time travel, teleportation, or cures for cancer or religion.
General relativity falls under cosmology, doesn’t it? I thought that GPS devices couldn’t work if we didn’t understand that. Granted (and if so), that’s an application that’s already emerged. And could research into particle physics potentially give us (again as a side benefit) some practical techniques for generating (or locating, or collecting) useful particles?
I’m thinking as much (or more) of the technologies that need to be developed to pursue a given topic, as much as the topic itself.
Research into particle physics is very likely to lead to practical applications. It’s already given us TVs, or rather Cathode Rays tubes, X-Rays and PET scans amongst many others. So it’s inconceivable that more advances won’t come.
But the thing is that none of those things were foreseeable. Nobody though that the first CRT would be useful for producing images. It was originally just a tool for studying particle behaviour. Ditto with X-rays PE technology and so forth.
Which is the problem with your question. A great many fields of study have no foreseeable practical applications. But you’d be a fool to say that they don’t have unforeseeable applications.
To give an example that a layman can understand. There are thousands of researchers worldwide that do biota surveys. They simply document the numbers of species in any given area at any given time. That research in most cases has no foreseeable practical application. It is the collection of knowledge for the sake of knowledge. But do you think that this work won’t have unforeseen applications? It’s hard to believe.
I have no idea what you mean by this. Are you referring to things like lasers that had to be developed to to study certain aspects of optics? If so there are almost limitless numbers of such devices. Almost every research institution in the world has some sort of contraption that has been purpose built to assist with their work.
First part is not correct, plenty of basic, curiosity-driven, no forseeable apps whatsoever research in the best journals. The second part is absolutely correct - There are no major areas of research with no forseeable commercial apps that enjoy funding. That is certainly a fair generalisation, perhaps with the caveat that ‘commercial’ can be interpreted extremely broadly.
That doesn’t mean it doesn’t get done, clearly it is getting done if it’s being published in good journals. But funding comes in all shapes and sizes e.g. a PI might get a grant with some sort of vague commercial justification, but actually use it to do something very different. Or they might recieve personal funding because they are a research leader and use it to what they feel like. But if you’re talking about sitting down and writing a project grant to a major research sponsor, like a government, charity or industry, and saying that you cannot forsee any commerical or societal impact at all, then that does not seem possible in the modern era, if it was even ever possible.
This puts the PI in an absurd position of having to quantify and forsee the impact of their research before it has been done, when, as stated in this thread, so many applications of basic research have been demonstrated to be unforseeable.
One sort of exception might be if you interpret commerical impact broadly enough to include training PhD students. So the exact focus of the research may be very curiosity-based, but if it is recognised as producing very skilled and able people for a particular industry then there will be support for it. Industry, is very good at supporting things in my line of work for this reason - they support the very applied stuff they have a clear IP stake in, the sort of problem-solving research most people would imagine industry funding. But there’s a second funding model where they have no interest in IP or the real focus of the work, it’s just an exercise in having their name associated with stuff in top line journals and access to well trained people.
Oh, yes, please. I hope it’s not too much of that smarty-pants stuff, I find it so hard to follow.
Are you sure about that example? Even a layman dummy like me has heard of ecology, conservation and cancer research.
You just gave a few perfect examples, i.e., cathode ray tubes, X-rays and PET scans.
On the other hand, to Busy Scissors: that’s exactly what I was wondering, thanks.
ETA: A follow-up question, though. In that case, how do university astronomy departments get funding? Or is the prestige thing enough to carry it all?
Paleontology?
Oh wait… They sell books, make more accurate movies that sell, commercial museums, etc.
So even that doesn’t count I guess.
Basic research is not meant to have any foreseeable commercial values. It’s just to find out how things work and expand our knowledge of things, but that doesn’t mean that the findings cannot be put to good moneymaking use.
I don’t know what an astronomy grant would look like tbh; although I’m sure there are some posters here who do. Certainly you would play the prestige card - astronomy being the cradle of scientific thought etc.
Modern research funding is all about ‘impact’, which can be defined as you like. Clearly you can go to town on the potential impact of astronomy on the public’s understanding of science, probably one of the most accessible sciences there is. I’d guess there would be tangible commerical outcomes to bring in as well from the instrumentation - cutting edge optics / engineering technology required.
ITSM that the main challenge with astronomy / cosmology funding is that it’s big science, meaning big, collaborative funding and facilites required to ask the big questions. You can’t just go into the lab tomorrow and make shit happen the way you can in some other disciplines. It’s a lot easier to justify curiosity-driven, basic research when you’re only asking for 100 grand rather than 10 million.
Maybe that’s true on paper, but it doesn’t even remotely resemble the way researchers actually operate.
I’m not sure what your point is here. What about those things?
It’s not quite science, but the notion of Turing degrees definitely fits the bill of having no obvious applications. In short, it’s an attempt to measure the relative difficulty of provably unsolvable problems.
If you live near a research university, you might try locating their Office of Technology Transfer and taking a stroll through it. All those people working in there are serving as liaisons between researchers at the forefront of their fields and the commercial entities wanting to license their discoveries, techniques, or devices.
Anything that involves hardware of any kind pretty much has “side effect” applications, often niche, since the science wouldn’t be new if it didn’t require new engineering and technological developments to get at it. (There isn’t much low-hanging fruit anymore, except in the newest sub-fields.) For the most part, you won’t have heard of these applications, because they aren’t intended for a retail audience.
I’m certain that deep within iRobot headquarters there are schematics for a new kind of Roomba that washes and folds laundry, which are entirely complete and ready to manufacture except for one spot that says, “Insert Higgs Boson Here”.
More like, cosmology falls under general relativity. There’s plenty you can do with relativity that doesn’t touch on cosmology, but almost nothing you can do in cosmology that doesn’t touch on relativity.
I don’t know nothin’ 'bout mathematics—
But I’d guess that most of what gets published in journals of pure mathematical research has no practical or commercial applications.
(one exception: yeah, I know that abstract math is the basis of encryption. Okay, so there are a couple of concepts of pure math that turned out to be vitally important, but were once thought to have no practical use. But those concepts are(I assume) a very, very small proportion of the research that is published as “pure math” . And most of it is totally useless to the rest of the human race (all 7 billion of us, each of whom flunked first-semester calculus.)