| That is because you are not suppose to talk about it either because people get mad or under the assumption they won't be able to understand. Without asserting truth, where the topic goes wrong often Ill attempt to do a simple example, fail and prove my point (haha) We have a law here that roughly says for all government construction projects there must be 1% spend on art. The most convenient way to deal with this "problem" it to take the 1% and have some artist create one of those unsightly giant blobs of metal. The size justifies the price. No one needs this, few can appreciate it and with a lot of effort you could create something or many things that more people would enjoy. We also have science budgets. The most convenient way to deal with that problem is to have as large as possible experiments where size also justifies the cost. If one was to make a lot of effort one could create many experiments each with a weight in practicality. The very idea might be offensive for pure science. But say, improve wind, wave, solar, improve batteries, etc or even a big project like an attempt to fix scientific publishing, the study replication problem, the archiving of research data, etc Or you can spend everything on one giant particle collider. It would be interesting but when we sort the set by usefulness it wont be in the top 100k. One might look at great scientists and see what impact their work had on the real world. Faraday pops to mind. You could ignore everything Tesla did after his AC motor and it would still be stunning. And then Relativity Theory. A pile of free floating nonsense with no connection to anything. I could be accused of not understanding the elegance of it but I don't have to as nothing practical followed. There was no real world revolution of the kind that makes great scientists. Just saying it doesn't make it true. Pure science is to slow to meaningfully fill the void of possible questions. We have by comparison only a hand full of real problems to solve. We might actually make some progress there if we care for it. Those answers will trigger an infinite chain of new questions - practical questions. |