Basic Research — Why Do What Has No Use?

A list of useless things

Primes were pure curiosity for more than two thousand years; some mathematicians boasted of their uselessness. As the last piece showed, internet cryptography now rests entirely on them.

There was work on how atomic nuclei wobble inside a magnet — a physicists' concern. It became the hospital MRI: the magnetic resonance of the fifteenth piece.

That time runs slow for fast-moving things was, a century ago, pure theory. Leave that correction out today and satellite navigation drifts some ten kilometres in a day.

That does not mean anything goes

Not asking about use does not mean having no standards. Basic research has demanding ones.

1. Is the question answerable? Grand and beautiful is not science if there is no way to check it.
2. Has nobody done it? Repeating what has been done is confirmation, not discovery.
3. Would being wrong show? An account that fits any outcome says nothing.

So the use is left open while the question is chosen with great severity. That is basic research.

A little further in

The unit of time is different

The largest difference from applied work is time.

Some questions cannot be asked inside a three-year grant — the ones where ten years of digging barely reaches the entrance. Where results must be produced every three years, nobody chooses such a question. They choose what is sure to come out.

So the institute forms research centres and leaves them alone for a long time. It hires a person and entrusts the subject to that person: less a task assigned than a place given.

We started late

Korea did applied work first for a long time — making well and quickly what already existed. At the time that was the right choice; catching up mattered more than finding out.

But once you have caught up, the next problem appears. To go in front you must do what nobody has done, and what nobody has done usually comes out of basic work. When there is nothing left to copy, what is needed changes.

That is the background to the Institute for Basic Science, founded in 2011. The name says basic first.

What is done here

There are some thirty research centres, and their subjects have little in common.

1. Digging at the floor of matter — particles and forces, and things whose identity is still unknown.
2. Mathematics — the standard example of a field not asked what it is for.
3. Nano and new materials — the inside of the sixteenth piece, where size changes properties.
4. Life and the genome — what actually happens inside a cell.
5. Climate and the Earth — looking deeper into the ground and air of the twelfth piece.

There is also an underground laboratory a kilometre down in a disused mine in Gangwon province. Why go underground? Because radiation pouring from the sky is so noisy that seeing a very rare event means blocking that noise with earth and rock. Not turning up the light to see, but making the world quieter.

The heavy-ion accelerator of the second piece also began here and has since been separated out.

And if nothing comes of it?

This should be said plainly. Most basic research leads to no visible use. The argument that the money is wasted is perpetual, and it is not absurd.

Two reasons for doing it anyway.

What not asking about use means

It should not be read as ignoring use. It means not fixing the use in advance.

Think of sowing and harvesting as different jobs. The sower does not know what fruit will come, and the harvester usually arrives from another field. Almost everything in this series had that shape.

What you would study to do this

It is not a place of researchers only.

1. Someone who digs at the question — physics, mathematics, chemistry, biology, through graduate and postdoctoral years.
2. Someone who builds the instruments — measuring what has never been measured needs a machine that does not exist. Mechanical and electronic work.
3. Someone who keeps the conditions — air and water in an underground laboratory, cryogenic plant, vibration.
4. Someone who keeps the research running — grants, international collaboration, safety and regulation. Research administration.
5. Someone who writes it down — journal editing, science writing, exhibition and interpretation.

The second line is the hidden axis of the field. To measure what nobody has measured there is no machine to buy, so a basic science institute always keeps people who cut metal and lay out circuits themselves. Detectors built this way have gone on to become hospital imaging equipment.

One thing said soberly: this road is long and the places are few. Years follow the degree. It suits someone who knows that and still wants the answer.

Closing the series

What is any of this for? Seventeen pieces began with that question.

Past fusion and accelerators and rockets and supercomputers, the last stop is a place where the question is not asked. It looks like a strange ending and it is a natural one: nearly everything useful we passed came out of somewhere that was not asked.

So the answer is probably this. What has no known use today becomes the material for whoever decides its use tomorrow, and somebody has to be making that material.

The question that remainsA seed whose fruit we may never see — why should we plant it?