I work in particle physics. So as is natural for a researcher in such a field, I find myself often answering questions along the lines of “what’s the point of all this?” Why is so much effort poured into questions fuelled only by curiosity?

It’s a fair question. Society collectively pays for us to build big colliders and devote trillions of hours of computing time to finding the next fundamental particle. Particle physics is one of a number of fields one could call blue skies research, research that has no obvious useful application. Blue skies research mostly relies on funding from taxpayers, so in general people deserve an answer to “what is the point of all this?” The following is my attempt at an answer.

Firstly, I’ll just state that there is no argument about whether research in general is worthwhile. Your phone, computer, clothes, medicines, car, are all products of the collective elbow grease of the millions of scientists that innovated before you. If you want something more quantitative, most studies estimate investment in research by governments to return 20-30%, twice the average return on the equivalent investment is stocks [1].

Secondly, in arguing for blue skies research I’m not going to appeal to all this “noble quest to find the true nature of reality” bullshit. It’s nice that people see fundamental science that way, and it’s certainly an inspiring way to frame things, but it doesn’t count as a real argument for investment in such research. What is the value of finding the true nature of reality? It’s impossible to decide. Things like technological progress and the improvement of people’s lives however, is something one can realistically estimate a value for.

Also, to be clear, I’m not trying to say that blue skies is the most important type of research, rather that it’s one of many necessary parts of the science ecosystem. Since the share of funding for blue skies research is currently falling in general [2,3], blue skies fields are those most in need of advocacy.

I’ll go into three broad arguments below; the necessity for basic knowledge in innovation, our inability to predict the directions of investigation that turn out to be useful, and what makes blue skies research more important now than it has ever been.

1: Innovation depends on Blue Skies Research

The science of engineering is in a sense the backbone of civilization. And engineering is underpinned by the work of Isaac Newton. Newton’s laws, the laws that govern how object behave when acted on by forces, is an extremely general way of modelling any physical system. Newton’s work is quintessential blue skies; driven only by his desire to understand nature in a deeper way. His work did not result from efforts to build a bridge, yet most bridges build in the recent past incorporated Newton’s work [4].

The understanding of chemistry has been used on some level to produce everything we eat, wear and use. Similar to engineering, the world would look very different without it. Much of modern chemistry is deeply dependant on quantum mechanics, the product of an array of discoveries and formulations driven by curiosity.

If you’d like a more direct and concrete application of quantum mechanics, I give you computers. The fundamental building block of a computer is a transistor, something that would not have existed if it weren’t for our understanding of quantum mechanics.

I could go on indefinitely. The general point is that all applied research relies on the more fundamental work that preceded it. Pick up any piece of technology, medicine or whatever, and investigate all the knowledge that was necessary for its creation, and you will discover a manifold of insights born of curiosity.

A common analogy is that science is like a forest, and each tree is a specific discipline [5]. The base of the tree is the underpinnings of that field, and usually a result of curiosity. For example, Newton’s laws could live at the base of the engineering tree, or the theory of evolution at base of the biology tree. The branches represent more applied areas, and the leaves represent the benefit of the application, the real-world benefit to people’s lives. It’s the most important part, but could not exist without the branches or the base.



Some work has been done to quantify the impact of fundamental research on applied sciences. Let’s take biomedical science as an example field. One study [6] focussed on a number of medical breakthroughs from 1945-1975, and identified an “essential body of knowledge” that if absent, these breakthroughs could not have taken place. This body of knowledge was around 62% comprised of fundamental, curiosity-driven research. Another study [7], using different methods, produced a lower estimate of 21%. While one can quarrel about which to believe, both imply that some amount of blue skies research was essential to the breakthroughs in question.

Less investigation of this type has been done in other sciences like physics or engineering. But if you need some hard evidence for the fact that engineering relies on fundamental research, open an engineering textbook.

Science has followed this pattern of applications following fundamental developments throughout history, and there’s no reason to expect this to change in the future. The blue skies scientists of today are planting new trees that will grow leaves in the future. Fundamental research is a long-term investment, it will not produce immediate applications, but its value will be realized at some point down the line.



You may protest however that this only shows that some fundamental research is important, while much of it may end up being a waste of time. The next section addresses this worry.

2: The Scattergun

Imagine you lived in the year 1860, and you are tasked with designing a new type of candle. The candle must be brighter, more efficient and longer lasting. You start playing around with different mixtures of wax and different candle shapes. All the obvious stuff. Perhaps you do end up with an optimized candle somehow. But, a decade or so later, the light bulb will burst onto the scene, presenting a far better solution to your problem. That light bulb did not come from a rival trying to work on the same problem as you, it came due to far more general studies of the phenomenon of electricity.

Electricity was not invented to make better candles. Nuclear physics was not created to generate power. The fact is,it’s often impossible to predict where the best solution to a problem will come from. There will always be a huge forest of different disciplines, besides the most obvious, that may hold the solution to your problem amongst its leaves.

In the last section I referenced a paper that estimated 62% of essential prior work needed for medical discoveries that were curiosity-driven [8]. This study also estimated that 41% of those papers were not even clinically orientated research.

One way of looking at this is the fact that all of the disciplines are connected to some extent. The effect of a breakthrough in one field can shoot out to a number of other parts of science in a difficult to predict way. The quantum revolution in physics produced new innovations and discoveries in chemistry, engineering, computer science, and recently even biology [9].

Scientists in general have recently been becoming more interested in these connections, with more and more inter-disciplinary work being done involving a number of fields [10].

Areas that we think of as deeply abstract often turn out to have connections to applied science. What do set theory, number theory, graph theory, combinatorics, and abstract algebra all have in common? They are all indispensable to computer scientists [11]. No matter how removed from the real world some PhD project may seem, it likely either already has connections to more applied fields, or connections will emerge in the future.

In order to solve the world’s current problems, it’s not enough to just focus directly on those problems. We need to explore every avenue, every nook and cranny of the manifold of systems to study and ideas to explore. We need a scattergun of science. This has always been true to an extent, but is becoming even truer today, and will become truer in the future. This brings us to the final section.

3. Challenges in the 21st Century



There are a lot of pressing and complicated problems on humanity’s horizon, and we really really need to get our arses into gear with solving them. None of the major carbon-emitting countries are on-target for fulfilling the Paris climate agreement [12,13,14,15]. There is no plan for mitigating for the coming rise of superbacteria or understanding of how automation will change society. Pandemics, dying bees, dwindling resources, asteroids, the list goes on and it’s scary as shit.

The problems of today are more complicated and challenging than the problems of the past [16]. Science suffers from diminishing returns; if any of these problems were easily and directly soluble, they would already have been solved. The problems of today are so complex that it’s more likely that connections to other fields of science, and strong contribution from fundamental research, will be necessary.

Take the problem of fusion power for example. If we can sustain a fusion reaction that can be exploited for a net energy gain, this would solve a lot of issues. There are indeed a bunch of technical engineering challenges there, but there are also some very fundamental problems, namely in plasma physics, that stand between us and fusion power [17]. It may also require new innovations from totally unexpected corners of science.

Another new facet of today’s looming problems in comparison to the past is their long-term nature. Problems like climate change are anything but immediate, the changes will happen over decades, and solutions will take decades to implement. Solutions will require the long-term investment that is fundamental research, research that may not have immediate uses but will improve our options 20 or 30 years down the line.

The climate is a very difficult problem for society to fully appreciate due to the insidious and abstract way it is creeping into our lives. It’s just as difficult to appreciate the importance of the subtle ways various scientific advancements will contribute to an overarching long-term effort against climate change, via the trickling of knowledge from fundamental to applied areas. The story is to some extent the same for all the other problems I have mentioned.

We must fire the scattergun of science everywhere in order to hit the solutions. We will need innovations from all areas, including blue skies research, to overcome the unimaginably complex web of challenges our world faces.