My friend Dror recommended The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge, the book version of the 1939 essay by Institute for Advanced Studies Founder and first Director, Abraham Flexner, in his most recent newsletter. It's 92 pages or something, inclusive of a very long (longer than the essay) introduction by current IAS Director Robbert Dijkgraaf, and time well spent.

Flexner argues that basic research driven by curiosity for its own sake leads to more impactful applications in the long-term than the short-term pursuit of specific applications. The supporting examples range from quantum mechanics to Pasteurization.

Once enough basic research accumulates, useless all the way, their useful applications basically self-assemble.

Take the radio.

Flexner asks Eastman Kodak founder George Eastman who he regarded as the most useful worker in science in the world.

Eastman replies: Marconi, the Italian inventor credited with long-distance radio.

Flexner rebuts:

“Mr. Eastman, Marconi was inevitable. The real credit for everything that has been done in the field of wireless belongs, as far as such fundamental credit can be definitely assigned to anyone, to Professor Clerk Maxwell, who in 1865 carried out certain abstruse and remote calculations in the field of magnetism and electricity. Maxwell reproduced his abstract equations in a treatise published in 1873. At the next meeting of the British Association, Professor H.J.S. Smith of Oxford declared that ‘no mathematician can turn over the pages of these volumes without realizing that they contain a theory which has already added largely to the methods and resources of pure mathematics.’ Other discoveries supplemented Maxwell’s theoretical work during the next fifteen years. Finally in 1887 and 1888 the scientific problem still remaining—the detection and demonstration of the electromagnetic waves which are the carriers of wireless signals—was solved by Heinrich Hertz, a worker in Helmholtz’s laboratory in Berlin. Neither Maxwell nor Hertz had any concern about the utility of their work; no such thought ever entered their minds. They had no practical objective. The inventor in the legal sense was of course Marconi, but what did Marconi invent? Merely the last technical detail, mainly the now obsolete receiving device called coherer, almost universally discarded.”

For his part, Flexner protected the creation of useless knowledge through the founding of IAS, where Einstein, von Neumann, and dozens of super-geniuses, many Jews fleeing a Hitler-infected Europe, were free to study whatever and however they wanted.

We would do well to build more worlds for geniuses -- whether in the arts, sciences, or other -- to dream and pursue their curiosities, unburdened by responsibility or structure. Science, it seems, is moving in the opposite direction. There is that stat that researchers spend 40% of their time on grant applications.

Imagine the opposite. Then do the opposite.

It's on the modern billionaire class to fund these spaces, where basic, useless, and even heretical research can thrive. If New Jersey's L. Bamberger department stores could support the IAS, what kind of brilliant uselessness might today's trillion-dollar tech giants underwrite?

"To be sure, we shall thus free some harmless cranks. To be sure, we shall thus waste some precious dollars," Flexner concedes. "But what is infinitely more important is that we shall be striking the shackles off the human mind and setting it free for the adventures which in our own day have, on the one hand, taken Hale and Rutherford and Einstein and their peers millions upon millions of miles into the uttermost realms of space and, on the other, loosed the boundless energy imprisoned in the atom."