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Comment by thanatropism | Hacker News Reader

What's the limit of basic vs. applied research?

AT&T has 8 Nobel prizes under its belt. At least three are fundamental science:

1937: Clinton J. Davisson shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for demonstrating the wave nature of matter.

1978: Arno A. Penzias and Robert W. Wilson shared the Nobel Prize in Physics. Penzias and Wilson were cited for their discovering cosmic microwave background radiation, a nearly uniform glow that fills the Universe in the microwave band of the radio spectrum.

1998: Horst Störmer, Robert Laughlin, and Daniel Tsui, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering and explaining the fractional quantum Hall effect.

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AT&T is a special case. It held a monopoly on a near universal service across almost the entire United States for close to a century.

I just can't think of any company comparable now. By the time of that first Nobel Prize in 1937, AT&T had basically had its monopoly for 30-50 years depending on exactly where you start counting, and it would continue to maintain it for nearly another 50.

> What's the limit of basic vs. applied research?

I'm not sure what you mean by limit, could you elaborate?

Re AT&T - I don't see how that indicates private companies are good for getting basic research done in general.

> Re AT&T - I don't see how that indicates private companies are good for getting basic research done in general.

True. But it is evidence against the proposition that basic research can only be done in public institutions. Which organizational form is better at doing it seems to be an open question.

If the basic research in question has applications that potentially meet real human needs and thus is of value, I would presume that private corporations would step forward to meet those needs if public institutions were not doing so.

> it is evidence against the proposition that basic research can only be done in public institutions.

I never made that claim.

> If the basic research in question has applications that potentially meet real human needs and thus is of value, I would presume that private corporations would step forward to meet those needs if public institutions were not doing so

That is nonsense. The whole thing about basic research is that it's generally very difficult to predict whether any particular kind of basic research is going to bear fruit and what sorts of applications it will have. You can't predict well, in advance. History shows this pretty clearly. You have to make a lot of diversified bets. There will be rare but massively profitable (long term) payoffs.

Discovering Quantum Mechanics has had huge benefits for society but no one could have predicted them in advance. And think of how much accumulated research was required over the years to lead to it, where it couldn't have been predicted that they'd lead to QM and its applications.

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