So I was reading about AMS this morning:

[ talking about dark matter ] ... -- knowing what nature is made of could be useful someday in ways nobody can dream. Einstein’s curved spacetime, equally elusive to the senses, proved crucial to the function of GPS devices that were invented decades after Einstein’s death.

Maybe I'm old fashioned but I find these common justifications of research quite vacuous. I'm sure if Einstein hasn't come out with GR and engineers developed the technology for satellites and relay signals the GR corrections would be built into a GPS technology (even if it was just modified Newtonian gravity or just experimentally corrected in a fudge factor somewhere).

Other scientific justifications via technology are just as hollow. CERN didn't invent the world wide web. A computer scientist at CERN did create the first version of HTTP and HTML with a text web-browser, on top of a pre-existing internet. It really had nothing to do with CERN doing physics; Berners-Lee just improved upon the pre-existing groundwork that was developed primarily by the military devoting tons of money into ARPANET and computers becoming more common and faster.

Or you see the justification that the 1T superconducting magnet technology developed for Fermilab led to MRIs that detect tumors, etc. However, the technology for MRIs existed prior as well as the idea that 1T superconducting magnets are feasible. It would have been much cheaper to just spend the research dollars directly to developing better magnets (in the principle of health care) than doing research, if practicality is your justification.

I definitely think scientific research should be done; but that we should not justify that it leads to practical results unless it is in a field that likely will. Cosmology and HEP should be done be because they reveal mysteries of the nature of our universe. That should be a goal in and of itself and we should have to lie.

Finally to quote Feynman (Cargo Cult Science from Surely You're Joking):

I would like to add something that's not essential to the science, but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the layman when you're talking as a scientist. I am not trying to tell you what to do about cheating on your wife, or fooling your girlfriend, or something like that, when you're not trying to be a scientist, but just trying to be an ordinary human being. We'll leave those problems up to you and your rabbi. I'm talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you're maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.

For example, I was a little surprised when I was talking to a friend who was going to go on the radio. He does work on cosmology and astronomy, and he wondered how he would explain what the applications of this work were. "Well," I said, "there aren't any." He said, "Yes, but then we won't get support for more research of this kind." I think that's kind of dishonest. If you're representing yourself as a scientist, then you should explain to the layman what you're doing--and if they don't want to support you under those circumstances, then that's their decision.

Thoughts?