The usefulness of useless knowledge

The great number theorist G.H. Hardy would probably have disagreed with the label “great”. In his book A Mathematician’s Apology, he admitted: “I have never done anything ‘useful’. No discovery of mine has made, or is likely to make, directly or indirectly, for good or ill, the least difference to the amenity of the world.” He added that he had trained other mathematicians “of the same kind as myself, and their work has been... as useless as my own”.

Since Mr Hardy was writing in 1940, there was a touch of the humblebrag about this claim. Chemist Fritz Haber had created chemical weapons for use in World War I. Engineers had produced artillery, tanks and strategic bombers. Mr Robert Oppenheimer and the other physicists would soon create the atomic bomb. There was a comfort in Mr Hardy’s protestations of uselessness – but perhaps a false comfort.

In the 1970s, some basic ideas in supposedly useless number theory were deployed by Mr Ron Rivest, Mr Adi Shamir and Mr Leonard Adleman. They developed the RSA algorithm, which enables public key cryptography, without which there would be no e-commerce. Cryptography is hardly valueless to the military, either. One never knows when useless knowledge will be useful after all.

Mr Hardy’s number theory was not alone in being accidentally useful. In a famous article published around the same time – The Usefulness Of Useless Knowledge (1939) – the head of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study Abraham Flexner made the case for apparently useless research. Dr Flexner started with the radio and the radio telegraph – remarkable inventions for which many people thanked Dr Guglielmo Marconi, the Nobel Prize-winning engineer.

Dr Flexner argued that the “real credit” should go to Dr James Clerk Maxwell and Dr Heinrich Hertz, who had done the fundamental research. “Neither Maxwell nor Hertz had any concern about the utility of their work,” wrote Dr Flexner, adding that Dr Marconi contributed “merely the last technical detail... now obsolete”.

Some more recent examples have been gathered by the American Association for the Advancement of Science for its Golden Goose awards. Ten years ago, the awards recognised the Honey Bee Algorithm, which began with biologists painting tiny numbers on the backs of chilled (and thus immobile) bees, and then tracking the individual bees to figure out how they contributed to the hive’s search for nectar. Why? Because they wanted to know.

A beeline to the internet

A couple of engineers became intrigued, figuring that maybe the bees had evolved a smart mechanism which the engineers might use to... well, do something. Perhaps they could use it to smooth the flow of traffic or suchlike. The bees had indeed evolved a clever approach, but the engineers couldn’t work out how to use it.

Finally, a computer scientist (Oxford, IBM) got in touch with the engineers, speculating that he had a problem to which they might have a solution. He was right. The honey-bee foraging system was adapted to spread viral and ever-shifting internet traffic across many different servers.

The Golden Goose awards also recognised the microbiologists who poked around in the geysers of Yellowstone Park in the US to understand how some bacteria managed to thrive at very high temperatures. The scientists discovered heat-resistant enzymes – polymerases – that could survive near boiling point. This, quite unexpectedly, paved the way for the polymerase chain reaction – a way of amplifying genetic information made all too famous by the PCR test of Covid-19 fame, but one which has many other applications.

The Golden Goose awards do not exist in a political vacuum: they are explicitly designed to showcase the unexpected benefits of federally funded research in the US, and were meant as a rebuke to the earlier Golden Fleece awards, in which then US senator William Proxmire would mock what he considered wasteful government spending – often on strange-sounding scientific projects.

Mr Proxmire was not wholly wrong: some government projects are a waste of money, and some academics produce research of little value. But the lack of value is generally not because the research is “useless” but because the research is sloppily or even fraudulently done. Superficially interesting claims congeal on the surface of a steaming vat of confusion.

Unfortunately, politicians are not well placed to venture an informed opinion on the value of scientific research. The fact that research sounds silly or strange is no guide to its value.

My own hunch – and it is just a hunch – is that it’s the research that seems obviously useful that is most likely to be polluted by bad science. The merely odd, purely curiosity-driven research is less likely to be tainted. Incestuous as it might seem, the people best placed to hand out funding for basic scientific research are other scientists.

This is not to say that society should just write a blank cheque to researchers. There are plenty of useful ways to guide scientific research.

One possibility is the use of innovation prizes, where funders specify a goal, and research teams are rewarded for achieving it. Examples range from the longitude prizes of the 18th century to the advanced market commitments that have been used to subsidise vaccine doses in the 21st century. The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s grand challenge of 2004 and 2005 helped jolt life into the field of autonomous vehicles for a few million dollars in prize money.

Another possibility is to explicitly favour long-shot research with a high chance of failure but a real prospect of creating a major breakthrough. The economists Pierre Azoulay, Joshua Graff Zivin and Gustavo Manso compared grants made by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) against the more cautious approach of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). They found that both organisations got what they were asking for: a higher success rate for NIH, and a mix of failures and breakthroughs for HHMI.

A healthy scientific ecosystem needs both. And perhaps most of all, it needs the odd-sounding, curiosity-driven research that no venture capitalist would dream of funding. The Nobel Prize-winning physiologist Archibald Hill once gave a public lecture at which a grumpy member of the public challenged him to explain what possible practical value there might be in his research.

Dr Hill replied: “To tell you the truth, we don’t do it because it is useful but because it’s amusing.” That’s the spirit. FINANCIAL TIMES