Fundamental Research Quotes

Researchers probably never anticipated when they started smashing atoms and protons in our large accelerators that their science their very basic research on matter would eventually give us remarkable life-saving technology.

There is nothing more exciting than having a life devoted to fundamental knowledge and to contributing to advance the borders of knowledge.

It is characteristic of fundamental discoveries, of great achievements of the intellect, that they retain an undiminished power upon the imagination of the thinker. The memorable experiment of Faraday with a disc rotating between two poles of a magnet, which has borne such magnificent fruit, has long passed into every-day experience; yet there are certain features about this embryo of the present dynamos and motors which even today appear to us striking, and are worthy of the most careful study.

Invest in basic research and recruit the best minds.

A wise man in China asked his gardener to plant a shrub. The gardener objected that it only flowered once in a hundred years. "In that case," said the wise man, "plant it immediately." [On the importance of fundamental research.]

The aim of particle physics is to understand what everything’s made of, and how everything sticks together. By everything I mean me and you, the Earth, the Sun, the 100 billion suns in our galaxy and the 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe. Absolutely everything.

Sometimes the public says, 'What's in it for Numero Uno? Am I going to get better television reception? Am I going to get better Internet reception?' Well, in some sense, yeah. ... All the wonders of quantum physics were learned basically from looking at atom-smasher technology. ... But let me let you in on a secret: We physicists are not driven to do this because of better color television. ... That's a spin-off. We do this because we want to understand our role and our place in the universe.

Regarding the fundamental investigations of mathematics, there is no final ending ... no first beginning.

There has no doubt to be fundamental research in science, but applied research is equally important for new improvements and changes in our techniques.

The work I was involved in had no obvious therapeutic benefit. It was purely of scientific interest. I hope the country will continue to support basic research even though it may have no obvious practical value.

I had been interested in particle physics, which deals with the fundamental constituents of matter.

Whilst worthy in themselves, applications shouldn't be the only way to drive basic research.

An important fraction of United States industry adheres to the idea that research of a fundamental character is worthwhile from a practical point of view.

Around 1960, I moved back to Europe, attracted by the newly founded European Organization for Nuclear Research where, for the first time, the idea of a joint European effort in a field of pure science was to be tried in practice.

The research I have been doing - studying how foodstuffs yield energy in living cells - does not lead to the kind of knowledge that can be expected to give immediate practical benefits to mankind. If I have chosen this field of study, it was because I believed in its importance in spite of its theoretical character.

Frequently, I have been asked if an experiment I have planned is pure or applied science; to me it is more important to know if the experiment will yield new and probably enduring knowledge about nature. If it is likely to yield such knowledge, it is, in my opinion, good fundamental research; and this is more important than whether the motivation is purely aesthetic satisfaction on the part of the experimenter on the one hand or the improvement of the stability of a high-power transistor on the other.

Fundamental discoveries can and should be made in industry or academies, but to carry that knowledge forward and to develop a new drug to the market has to depend on the resources of industry.

It is exciting to discover electrons and figure out the equations that govern their movement; it is boring to use those principles to design electric can openers. From here on out, it's all can openers.

I think a scientist's job is to explore the Universe, to explore the cosmos around us. People always want to know - why is that useful? Well, on just pure fundamental grounds, on some level it's like art, it's like umm, music, it's aesthetics, it's like philosophy. You want to know where you are in the Universe.

From 1949 to 1953, I studied towards the diploma in Natural Sciences at the Swiss Polytechnical School in Zurich. It is in the last year of this study that I made my first contacts with fundamental research, when working on the isolation and characterization of a new isomer of Cl34 with a half-life of 1.5 seconds.

Throughout history, people have studied pure science from a desire to understand the universe rather than practical applications for commercial gain. But their discoveries later turned out to have great practical benefits.

despite its apparent impracticality, the Administration values discovery-oriented science, and aims to continue to support the grand quest for knowledge about the universe at the largest and smallest scales.

Silicon Valley, after all, feeds off the existence of computers, the internet, the IT systems, satellites, the whole of micro electronics and so on, but a lot of that comes straight out of the state sector of the economy. Silicon Valley developed, but they expanded and turned it into commercial products and so on, but the innovation is on the basis of fundamental technological development that took places in places like this [MIT] on government funding, and that continues.

Time and time again, truly basic studies of simple experimental organisms have proved directly relevant to human biology and human disease. An investment in such basic studies is an effective investment indeed.

True science is distinctively the study of useless things. For the useful things will get studied without the aid of scientific men. To employ these rare minds on such work is like running a steam engine by burning diamonds.