At least three different reporters on Tuesday asked John Clarke, one of this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics laureates, how exactly we ended up with technology like the cellphone today from his obscure discovery of “macroscopic quantum tunneling and energy quantization” 40 years ago.
He never did give a straight answer. Perhaps because there isn’t one, no easy throughline to draw from the lab to our everyday lives. Often that line is a culmination of expertise that outweighs the contributions of one or a few scientists; it is an idea here, a breakthrough there and many failed experiments in between, sometimes over the course of decades.
The scientific Nobels announced this week underscore that point. All three awards — granted each year in physiology or medicine, physics and chemistry — honored achievements rooted in fundamental research from decades ago. Some experts interpret the selections by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences as representing the importance of slow, basic science, work pursued out of a desire to better understand the world.
In an age when government efficiency has been used to justify sharp cuts to scientific funding, the science Nobels offer a case for plodding curiosity: that esoteric, seemingly useless exploration can lay the bricks for a road to places we cannot yet see.
“It’s not just that it took a long time between the efforts and the prize, but that the effort itself was intergenerational,” said David I. Kaiser, a physicist and science historian at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “They’re not things for which we can have even well-formed questions, let alone clear and compelling answers” within a specific time frame, he added.
On Monday, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to three scientists who uncovered why the body’s immune system doesn’t attack itself. One of those scientists initiated experiments in the 1980s that did not bear significant fruit until 1995, and the other two laureates carried on that research through the early 2000s. The knowledge they revealed has led to developments in cancer treatment and has become a foundation for more than 200 ongoing clinical trials.
“It started by taking a thymus out of a mouse,” said Jo Handelsman, the director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Who would have thought that would be an exciting idea for the future of medicine?”
Dr. Clarke and two other physicists — Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis — won the Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday for demonstrating that two properties of quantum mechanics, the theory that describes how the subatomic universe behaves, can be observed in systems visible to the human eye.
At a news conference that day, Dr. Clarke explained that he and his colleagues had “no way of understanding the importance” of their work.
“You just don’t know how it’s going to evolve, because other people will pick up on the idea and develop it,” he said.
And on Wednesday, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to three chemists for the development of “metal-organic frameworks,” porous molecular structures with unusually high surface area, derived from experiments from the 1980s through the early 2000s. The concept forms the foundation of materials being used today to make industrial production more efficient, and being developed to tackle real-world needs like harvesting water from the air in dry places.
Decades of inquiry paved the way for the technology, treatments and toys of tomorrow.
It is practical to believe that when we invest time or money, it ought to have some predictable return. But tell that to Agnes Pockels, a self-taught German chemist, whose fascination with the soap bubbles made while washing dishes laid the groundwork for the field of nanotechnology decades after her death. Or the accounts of Isaac Newton, whose musings about an apple falling from a tree inspired a first theory of gravity, a bedrock that eventually took humans to space.
“Basic research is where the big steps come from,” Dr. Handelsman said.
Some benefits come in the form of more immediate byproducts of such work. One analysis estimates that nondefense research and development in the U.S. has a return of up to 300 percent in productivity growth. Another report found that every $1 invested by the National Institutes of Health, the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world, fuels $2.56 in economic activity. The pursuit to detect ripples in space-time inspired advances in computing, lasers, sensors and optics.
“It is always quite easy to demonstrate the power of curiosity and imagination looking backwards,” said Robbert Dijkgraaf, the president-elect of the International Science Council and former director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., a center of intellectual inquiry in its most basic form. But it can be difficult to predict exactly how, when or where, looking forward.
Paradoxically, Dr. Dijkgraaf said, “creating those spaces where people can think freely and explore freely is, in some sense, the most efficient way to spend your research dollars.”
In 1939, Abraham Flexner, the founding director of the Institute for Advanced Study, published an essay “pleading for the abolition of the word ‘use’” and arguing for the cultivation of scientific knowledge for nothing more than its own sake. To be human is to be curious, after all.
“The mere fact that they bring satisfaction,” Mr. Flexner wrote of such pursuits, “is all the justification that they need.”
Katrina Miller is a science reporter for The Times based in Chicago. She earned a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago.
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