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    The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge
    The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge
    The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge
    Ebook57 pages47 minutes

    The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge

    By Abraham Flexner and Robbert Dijkgraaf

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    A short, provocative book about why "useless" science often leads to humanity's greatest technological breakthroughs

    A forty-year tightening of funding for scientific research has meant that resources are increasingly directed toward applied or practical outcomes, with the intent of creating products of immediate value. In such a scenario, it makes sense to focus on the most identifiable and urgent problems, right? Actually, it doesn't. In his classic essay "The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge," Abraham Flexner, the founding director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the man who helped bring Albert Einstein to the United States, describes a great paradox of scientific research. The search for answers to deep questions, motivated solely by curiosity and without concern for applications, often leads not only to the greatest scientific discoveries but also to the most revolutionary technological breakthroughs. In short, no quantum mechanics, no computer chips.

    This brief book includes Flexner's timeless 1939 essay alongside a new companion essay by Robbert Dijkgraaf, the Institute's current director, in which he shows that Flexner's defense of the value of "the unobstructed pursuit of useless knowledge" may be even more relevant today than it was in the early twentieth century. Dijkgraaf describes how basic research has led to major transformations in the past century and explains why it is an essential precondition of innovation and the first step in social and cultural change. He makes the case that society can achieve deeper understanding and practical progress today and tomorrow only by truly valuing and substantially funding the curiosity-driven "pursuit of useless knowledge" in both the sciences and the humanities.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateFeb 6, 2017
    ISBN9781400884629
    The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge

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      Book preview

      The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge - Abraham Flexner

      Knowledge

      The World of Tomorrow

      ROBBERT DIJKGRAAF

      On April 30, 1939, under the gathering storm clouds of war, the New York World’s Fair opened in Flushing Meadows, in Queens. Its theme was The World of Tomorrow. Over the next eighteen months, nearly forty-five million visitors would be given a peek into a future shaped by newly emerging technologies. Some of the displayed innovations were truly visionary. The fair featured the first automatic dishwasher, air conditioner, and fax machine. The live broadcast of President Franklin Roosevelt’s opening speech introduced America to television. Newsreels showed Elektro the Moto-Man, a seven-foot tall, awkwardly moving aluminum robot that could speak by playing 78-rpm records, smoke a cigarette, and play with his robot dog Sparko. Other attractions, such as a pageant featuring magnificent steam-powered locomotives, could be better characterized as the last gasps of the world of yesterday.

      Albert Einstein, honorary chair of the fair’s science advisory committee, presided over the official illumination ceremony, also broadcast live on television. He spoke to a huge crowd on the topic of cosmic rays, highly energetic subatomic particles bombarding the Earth from outer space. The event has been described as a comedy of errors. Einstein’s talk could hardly be understood as the amplification system soon broke down. And the opening act—the capture of ten cosmic rays—ended with a spectacular debacle. The particles were transported by telephone line from the Hayden Planetarium in Manhattan to the fairgrounds in Queens, where bells and lights signaled their arrival. But when the tenth ray was captured, a power failure occurred to the great disappointment of the audience, which soon decamped. As the New York Times reported the next day, The crowd dropped science in favor of a spectacle that they could applaud.

      Two scientific discoveries that would soon dominate the world were absent at the World’s Fair: nuclear energy and electronic computers. Remarkably, the very beginnings of both technologies could be found at an institution that had been Einstein’s academic home since 1933: the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. The Institute was the brainchild of its first director, Abraham Flexner. Intended to be a paradise for scholars with no students or administrative duties, it allowed its academic stars to fully concentrate on deep thoughts, as far removed as possible from everyday matters and practical applications. It was the embodiment of Flexner’s vision of the unobstructed pursuit of useless knowledge, which would only show its use over many decades, if at all.

      However, the unforeseen usefulness came much faster than expected. By setting up his academic paradise, Flexner unintentionally enabled the nuclear and digital revolutions. Among his first appointments was Einstein, who would follow his speech at the World’s Fair with his famous letter to President Roosevelt in August 1939, urging him to start the atomic bomb project. The breakthrough paper by Niels Bohr and John Wheeler on the mechanism of nuclear fission appeared in the Physical Review on September 1, 1939, the same day World War II started.

      Another early Flexner appointee was the Hungarian mathematician John von Neumann, perhaps an even greater genius than Einstein, of almost extraterrestrial brilliance. Von Neumann was one of the Martians, an influential group of Hungarian scientists and mathematicians that also included Edward Teller, Eugene Wigner, and Leo Szilard, the physicist who helped draft Einstein’s letter to Roosevelt. A well-told story in physics is that when a frustrated Enrico Fermi asked where were the highly exceptional and talented aliens that were meant to find Earth, an impish Szilard replied, They are among us, but they call themselves Hungarians.

      Von Neumann’s early reputation was based on his work in pure mathematics and the foundations of quantum theory. Together with the American logician Alonzo Church, he made Princeton a center for mathematical

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