For subscribers
The usefulness of useless knowledge
Politicians aren’t the best judges of the merits of scientific research.
Sign up now: Get ST's newsletters delivered to your inbox
Biologists’ curiosity over how bees forage for nectar led to the Honey Bee Algorithm that was adapted to spread viral and ever-shifting internet traffic across servers.
PHOTO: AFP
Tim Harford
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.
