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Comment by EGreg | Hacker News Reader

Why not start a website where scientific discoveries can be linked to their uses on the one side, and on the other side to their contributors and former discoveries it is based on? Could be a wiki.

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I am not sure if the discovery of gravitation waves can be of any use to us (other than perhaps stimulate funding for further astrophysics research, that is).

Not yet, maybe. But eventually, I'm sure they'll be used directly in some other scientific discovery.

It seems early to conclude that. No one had a use for X-rays until over a century after people started messing around with them.

As I understand it there are four fundamental forces in physics: strong and weak nuclear forces, the electromagnetic force, and gravitational force.

This discovery of gravitational waves is similar to the discovery of electromagnetic waves that has touched almost every aspect of our lives.

I'm sure there will be ways to use this information. Maybe not now, but it certainly might help when humanity eventually looks to permanently slip the surly bonds of earth.

Not really, gravitational waves are distortions in space-time caused by gravity. They just confirmed something that was predicted by general relativity a century ago. That's a big deal, and I don't mean to sully that achievement, but saying it's as big a deal as the discovery of electromagnetism is really overselling it. Gravitational waves are profoundly difficult to detect and can only be created by monumental celestial events (colliding black holes), it's not going to spark an energy revolution like the study of electromagnetism did.

I do wonder if we will ever be able to refine the detection and use it to infer information about distant objects which we can't otherwise observe. If my understanding is correct, the waves should be subtly altered as they pass celestial objects.

Those things are a question of energy scales. The energy scales at which human life is possible are far (many orders of magnitude) removed from the energy scales at which gravitational waves could be meaningfully used, this won't change in any conceivable future. You would need to be able manipulate black holes to get even the tiny measurable distortions they just found, just by conservation of energy that most likely will forever be out of reach for humans.

The same is pretty much guaranteed for high energy applications of the strong and weak nuclear force like they are being explored by the LHC, although there it is less certain (quark gluon plasmas for example might be useful for something, maybe). Electromagnetic waves on the other hand are very compatible with the energy scales of human life.

That's a rather narrow view.

Can you imagine what went into building the gravitational wave observatories? Don't you think that's advanced the state of the art with respect to the different kinds of technology, manufacturing, and construction techniques involved?

I support biomedical research. We're adopting scientific collaboration tools developed by the high energy physics community and specifically LIGO. These tools make it possible for large-scale, multi-institution, transnational collaborations to readily and securely share data worldwide. I'm really excited about what has become possible.

Admittedly, that has nothing to do with the detection of gravitational waves themselves. Still, these projects (and others) have improved the state of the art, and while it might not lead to something you can buy at Walmart any time soon, it might make a malaria cure happen sooner, or improve the quality of care for tuberculosis patients, or reduce the rate of breast cancer---little stuff that over time adds up to hundreds of thousands of people alive and well who, without all those little things adding up, wouldn't be alive today.

any ancillary benefits that occur as side effects of funding a physics project, could almost certainly have been achieved, without the funding of the physics project. for example, direct investment into disease research is much more likely to have short-term impact.

that's not to say ancillary discoveries with impact outside the original domain don't occur- they're just not as cost effective.

But then that means you wouldn't have funded the physics project. In the long term, research in fundamental physics is the main thrust for human scientific progress, which is why it is given the importance it is.

Ancillary benefits are, by definition, not the primary thrust of what research is about.

Apologies if I misunderstood your comment.

Most of the big expensive physics projects actually have little to no impact on daily life, or really scientific progress they're mainly about confirming theories that were thought up a long time ago. Dollar-for-dollar medical research has a much greater impact than physics

Are you nuts? Without gravity waves how am I supposed to move the hand of my kid's watch in morse code, and transmit critical scientific data from beyond the event horizon of a black hole? And that's just the practical stuff we already know about... who knows what we'll come up with in a few years? :)

I'm sure many of the early discoveries regarding the sub-molecular structure of matter seemed pretty abstract at first. Then came the atomic bomb.

Speaking of atoms, indeed, as far as the ancient philosophy was concerned, atomism was a rather abstract idea. But the discoveries that confirmed the existence of atoms had been directly stimulated by the chemical research, and further advances in chemistry as well as the industry and medicine critically depended on it. (The atomic bomb, on the other hand, required the discovery of the atomic nucleus - which is a completely different object of study, and nothing about it was "abstract", either.)

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