Weisskopf asks: why pure science?
Science is playing an ever-increasing role in our culture, our life and the economy of the world. Yet at the same time its results are becoming, for the layman, increasingly abstract and apparently further removed from everyday life. Astronomy is dealing with cosmic cataclysms billions of light-years away; physics with nuclear particles which exist only a billionth of a second; biology with macro-molecules containing billions of atoms ["billion" is used here in its American sense of a thousand million]. Meanwhile, the pursuit of pure science is becoming more and more expensive. Astronomers want huge new radio-telescopes to look at strange objects at the edge of the universe; probers of outer space want ever more expensive gadgets for the exploration of realms far removed from us; physicists want more money to find out more about the innermost structure of the atomic nucleus – and the citizen has a right to ask: why pure science?
When studying the development of industrial nations, one cannot fail to make the following observations: in the first half of the nineteenth century, England was the great industrial nation and, at the same time, produced the great names in fundamental research: Maxwell, Young, Faraday, etc. Then, in the second half of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th, Germany began to play a leading part. It is then that one finds a galaxy of German physicists: Helmholtz, Nernst, Rontgen, Planck, Sommerfeld, Heisenberg, etc. Later in the 20th century, as the US became the leading industrial nation, fundamental science blossomed in the US. Fermi, Oppenheimer, Lawrence, Rabi, McMillan, Alvarez, Schwinger, Feynman are only a few names illustrating this. There is a clear connection: where there is industrial growth there is basic science, and where there is basic science there is industrial growth.
The value of fundamental research does not lie only in the ideas it produces. If science is highly regarded and the importance of being concerned with the most up-to-date problems of fundamental research is recognized, then a spiritual climate is created which influences all other activities. An atmosphere of creativity is established which penetrates to every cultural frontier. Applied sciences and technology are forced to adjust themselves to the highest intellectual standards, which are determined in pure research; that is what attracts productive people and brings productive scientists to those countries where science is at its highest level.
Fundamental research creates the intellectual climate in which our modern civilization flourishes. It pumps the lifeblood of ideas and inventiveness not only into the technological laboratories and factories, but into every cultural activity of our time. The case for generous support for pure and fundamental science is as simple as that. A small part only of a nation's total income is needed to keep fundamental research in full swing. It would be wrong to try to save a fraction of this small part if such savings weakened the most vital and active part of our intellectual life, the part which we all should regard with pride as one of the highest achievements of our century.
• Compiled from "Why pure science?" pp136–142. Based on a talk given by Victor Weisskopf in Brussels in April 1964 during the "Journées nationales des hautes energies", organized by the Institut interuniversitaire des sciences nucléaires and the Societé belge de physique.
Compiler's note
J J Thomson, who discovered the electron in 1897, was, unsurprisingly, an advocate of pure science, which he defined as "research made without any idea of application to industrial matters, but solely with the view of extending our knowledge of the laws of nature". In this talk in 1964, Victor Weisskopf (CERN's director-general 1961–1965) reasoned that pure science should be publicly funded because it creates the intellectual climate in which our civilization flourishes. In 1997, Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith (director-general 1994–1998) argued that government funding for basic science is essential because the benefits, and hence the economic returns, are general and are not specific to individual products (see http://doc.cern.ch/archive/electronic/cern/preprints/open/open-99-011.pdf ). Obviously these authors would be unlikely to put a case against pure science, but at a time when excessive flourishing of our civilization might lead to its demise, "the citizen" has a right to ask whether research "without any idea of application" is unequivocally defensible.