The usefulness of useless knowledge

The title is supposedly a quote of Abraham Flexner, one of the co-founders of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, that ivory tower where employees are allowed to think about whatever they wish, with no pressure to produce any results whatsoever.

In the January 2015 issue of Physics Today, Oscar Greenberg has an article titled "The origin of quark color," in which he discusses this history of his idea that quarks have three types of color "charge," similar to the two types of electric charge (positive and negative) and the one type of gravitational "charge," i.e., mass. But he starts off philosophically about how "the pursuit of these useless satisfactions proves unexpectedly the source from which undreamed-of utility is derived" (another Flexner quote). He makes the point that quark color was "useless" in this sense. In fact, the same could be said of electric charge and electricity and magnetism in general. Greenberg also repeats that (probably apocryphal) story of Michael Faraday showing one of his electricity and magnetism experiments to a prime minister, who asked "What good is it?" And Faraday replied "I don't know Mr Prime Minister, but one day you will tax it." (see here for some of the history of the quote). Electricity and magnetism has certainly turned out to have "undreamed-of utility" and also to be taxed beyond belief.

When I was a kid, I remember reading about "pure" research and "applied" research, and I was not really sure what kinds of things would fit into the "pure" category. But I guess what I've been doing (see here) can be classified as "pure." Recently, one of my ex-students asked my what I was working on, and I told him about that work on solitons in space plasmas, and he replied "What do you think/hope it will accomplish? Would it create better spacecraft in the future?" I said "Well, at this point it's very close to "pure" research, i.e., we just want to understand the universe in which we live a little better." I guess I was getting a little "philosophical" myself. But I think that you never know how the issues you work on are going to be used (or used for) in the future. It reminds me of the mathematician G.H. Hardy, who said.

"I have never done anything 'useful.' No discovery of mine has made, or is likely to make, directly or indirectly, for good or ill, the least difference to the amenity of the world."

And interestingly, much of his work has found applications in science.

Update: Here is the latest on the pure research associated with quark color.