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Comment by MicroBerto | Hacker News Reader

My response is that for every 100 of these types of papers, one of them may prove to be pivotal or inspirational in something truly groundbreaking and functionally useful. For this reason, I am all for 100 different people spending their time doing things like this, because eventually one of them will make an impact that is greater than 100x the efforts of 100 normal men.

It's just a different kind of "brick in the wall" - only the diamonds in the rough can turn out to be hugely important for something else in the future.

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Great point. I think this applies to scientific research in general, which is why the constant emphasis on only funding research with clear and immediate economic payoff seems a bit shortsighted.

In reality, chances are that most research won't lead to anything significant - but the 1% that does will have outsized impact that will more than pay for the rest. And we don't know which 1% this will be in advance.

Unfortunately, you can very easily tell that what is excused as basic science is often just 'solutions looking for a problem'. Most "basic science" these days is just professors looking to get paid with no accountability.

Although there have been a few Fouriers across history, the most compelling brilliant scientists had one foot in applied science working on theory in the spare time. Euler, Gauss, Faraday, Langmuir. Most of the best basic science had goals "to explain something pressing" (which is not the same as "do something because there will be no payoff") anyways, like Planck, Einstein, Peter Mitchell.

There's something to be gained about cutting your teeth on problems with results, instead of just lollygagging about in theoryland.

Feynman talked about this in an exercise where he described the motion of spinning discs - a very "applied" problem, and remarked that later those insights proved useful in a separate, unrelated problem.

Exactly. I have the broadly same issue with my doctorate: I know essentially what I showed, but I only ever really completely understood my thesis's more abstruse passages around the time I was writing them (and being examined on them). But I don't find this surprising or concerning. The overriding motivation for doing a PhD was to try to contribute some original knowledge and insights to a field I find interesting. All this article talks about is, what did my PhD do for me personally, and tangentially how can the PhD experience help to train the mathematical brain. To me those are secondary issues, my reward is that my thesis, although hardly earth-shattering, gets checked out of the library every so often, and I get emails from interested and interesting people asking me about it.

I don't necessarily agree with that point of view. Even if a paper brings nothing new to the pot, it might help others to get into a field or a problem. I often find myself reading the introduction and first sections of useless (to me) papers just because they do a really good job at explaining things that are confusing. This last years I've really came to appreciate papers as a learning tool instead of class notes or books.

Who's to say it doesn't bring anything new? If it's never been written before, it's new.

I often see technology growing in a "staircase" fashion. Things plateau, and then there's a period of many small 'chink in the armor' improvements... and then one of those ideas inspires something that floods into a whole new area.

Sometimes it takes a lot of smart brains throwing time at 'useless' junk before that insane theory is found. Othertimes we just await an Einstein-like brain to come on the scene and activate new stuff.

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