The wonder of blue skies

Having been acquainted with a healthy cross-section of my fellow grad students in the past few years, I have found a dichotomy in the topics represented in their research. In fields such as molecular biology and the various forms of engineering, the fruits of their work are clearly useful and of considerable practical value, whether it is novel network security algorithms or political analyses of international bodies. When confronted with a hypothetical evil bureaucrat threatening to cut off their funding, these researchers can easily justify the practical importance of their work. Better still, they could just shrug and find someone else willing to pay cold hard cash for the results of their intellectual work.

I, on the other hand, might have difficulty explaining why anyone should care about the temperature and composition of the intergalactic gas a few billion light years away. Yet society as a whole supports me financially to carry out my research, as well as the entire communities of astronomers, pure mathematicians, art historians and other freeloaders.

For the broad fields of “blue sky” sciences that have no apparent applications, it can be argued that the seemingly abstract discoveries of today will become tomorrow’s technology. In the same way that the early 20th-century theories of atomic physics and relativity begat nuclear weapons and energy a few decades later, perhaps mankind will find some way to harness today’s Standard Model of particle physics into applications that will impact mankind’s daily lives. In my own field, the astrophysical processes occurring in distant stars and galaxies are related to those governing the detonation of a thermonuclear weapon, which is probably why the Defense and Energy Departments provide significant funding to astrophysics research.

Nevertheless, I don’t think this argument of “spin-off” benefits can fully justify all academic scholarship, as it makes for a rather roundabout way to get at said benefits. There are easier ways to get non-stick frying pans than plowing a few hundred billion into the space program, and in any case this doesn’t provide a raison d’etre for some of my friends, one of whom spends his days studying contemporary Chinese theater.

I have heard a professor say that our research is being done purely for the sake of learning and knowledge. This, too, I do not find completely satisfactory, as I believe there exists such a thing as frivolous knowledge.

Strangely enough, I might have found the justification for the academic vocation from packs of screaming 8-year-olds. Apart from staring blankly at my computer all day, one of the things I do in my department is to help out at the monthly open houses where members of the public get to look at the night sky through the little telescope in our building. Occasionally we get entire Cub Scout troops cramming into the telescope dome. As impatient and hyperactive as they are, there is silence when I explain to them the distant objects and phenomena that they are seeing through the eyepiece. Even in the darkness of the telescope dome, the sense of awe from the children was palpable.

Admittedly, most other areas of scholarship do not evoke a visceral sense of wonder quite as easily as pointing up at the night sky, but one has to move up the cerebral cortex a bit more to partake in their fruits. I recently read a book titled “Conquistadors,” an account of the downfall of the Aztec Empire at the hands of Hernan Cortes and his conquistadors. The topic intrigued me, as earlier this year I had travelled through the highlands east of Mexico City, through which Cortes had passed in his quest for the Aztec capital. Learning the centuries-old history of that region gave me shivers up my spine: The landscape of the great Mexican volcanoes that I had seen in my trip was now augmented in my mind’s eye with the ghosts of discovery and conflict. The toil of historians and scholars through the centuries had suffused with my own experience in a manner that was literally wonderful.

Ultimately, number theorists are not curing any maladies. Classicists are not inventing new technologies to benefit mankind. Philosophers aren’t generating wealth for themselves or anyone else. But these scholars are in the business of manufacturing curiosity, wonder and imagination. This not only contributes to mankind, but is indeed part of what makes mankind human.