Well, I would say that Marconi and those who followed in his footsteps have made a huge contribution to human welfare and to glorify Hertz and Maxwell to the expense of the engineers and businesspeople who've made radio a reality is a big mistake.
When I hear this kind of thing, however, I immediately realize how science itself does most of the work of turning people against science.
When I was in graduate school I quickly got the message that a son of a construction worker wasn't going to get a permanent career in academia. In all the time I spent around an Ivy League school, I met just one professor who didn't have at least one professor for a parent -- and I can say he was a thoroughly miserable twisted soul... the epitomy of the nasty physics professor.
Although the image of science is beautiful, the reality is that it's a system that runs young people like racehorses and disposes of most of them. Because of that, it's hard for me to reccomend a career in science to a young person, like my son.
That same university is now going through some drastic changes and the astonishing thing is the lack of resistance. Students don't resist because they're only there for four years and don't have a picture of what's going on. Tenured profs don't care because their motto, to a man, is "aprois moi le deluge."
That's the motto of a man (or woman) who can't be fired. If the personal fate of academics was tied to the fate of their institution, the fate of their field, the fate of their students and of mankind, we might see a major upwelling of humanity and morality in the academic class.
I would argue Marconi and Maxwell share equal credit. They both stood on the shoulders of giants to accomplish something they could never have done alone, and it is likely that if either hadn't done what they did, somebody else would have done so fairly soon.
But critical to the argument, Marconi stood on Maxwell's shoulders. The wireless would not have existed without the fundamental, "pointless" work of Maxwell and others. I would imagine cell phones were far from Maxwell's mind when he did his work, yet those, too, are a legacy of his discoveries.
I look at things like the LHC and really question whether anything practical will come of it. In the end, I don't care, because we are learning, and our species seems to do better when exploring new frontiers, no matter where they are. (I do question whether we could learn more by funding a lot more smaller experiments, but that's a different issue.)
Particle physics needed the LHC. In particle physics, the fastest way to answer the question "are there new particles at higher energies?" is to collide particles at those higher energies. Also, $4.4 billion dollars isn't that much. For the price of Zynga and Instagram, you get to push out the limits of our understanding of the interactions of fundamental particles.
I'm still hoping know the Higgs mass will lead to hover boards. I don't really believe it will, but I'm sure Maxwell never thought his work would lead to something like always-connected pocket computers. I don't begrudge spending the money at all, as there is little question that particle physics has massively impacted everybody's lives.
That said, we have limited amounts to spend on tese things (more limited than it should be!), so we should be asking, "What experiments help us learn the most?" when we spend it. We should not be asking, "What experiment will yield something I can sell?"
> so we should be asking, "What experiments help us learn the most?" when we spend it.
Understood, but isn't the point of not saying "What experiment will yield something I can sell?"", is that we don't know the answer to the question "What experiments help us learn the most?"
Again, the LHC isn't that expensive. Mark Zuckerberg lost more money over the last two days to pay for both the LHC and the Hubble.
Strange experiences, and I can see why you wouldn't much like science after that. I haven't spent any time at Ivy League institutions, but in computer science at other research universities, my experience is exactly the opposite, that most researchers come from non-academic families, and in many cases from immigrant families. I've run into lots of tenured professors who are either immigrants themselves, or born to working-class or middle-class immigrant parents, but I can't think of anyone I've met who has some kind of 3-generation Yale pedigree, like the kind you find among politicians.
When I hear this kind of thing, however, I immediately realize how science itself does most of the work of turning people against science.
When I was in graduate school I quickly got the message that a son of a construction worker wasn't going to get a permanent career in academia. In all the time I spent around an Ivy League school, I met just one professor who didn't have at least one professor for a parent -- and I can say he was a thoroughly miserable twisted soul... the epitomy of the nasty physics professor.
Although the image of science is beautiful, the reality is that it's a system that runs young people like racehorses and disposes of most of them. Because of that, it's hard for me to reccomend a career in science to a young person, like my son.
That same university is now going through some drastic changes and the astonishing thing is the lack of resistance. Students don't resist because they're only there for four years and don't have a picture of what's going on. Tenured profs don't care because their motto, to a man, is "aprois moi le deluge."
That's the motto of a man (or woman) who can't be fired. If the personal fate of academics was tied to the fate of their institution, the fate of their field, the fate of their students and of mankind, we might see a major upwelling of humanity and morality in the academic class.