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Asked by anon-217223 to Lucy on 14 Jun 2019.
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Lucy Budge answered on 14 Jun 2019:
It’s difficult to know! My work isn’t directly solving a specific problem (such as looking for cancer cures) but even the science that seems distant from our everyday lives can come across discoveries or lead to inventions that affect everyone’s lives!
For example the history of particle physics has lead to the discovery of the electron without which we couldn’t have any electrical devices! And the world wide web/internet was developed by particle physicists who wanted to share their results with others! There are some cancer treatments (proton therapy) that have come out of particle physics too.
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Comments
Harrison commented on :
Allow me to be brutally honest: the reason I do what I do is because I find it exciting and interesting, not because it has any direct material benefit to us now or in the future. That’s because I think of our exploration of Nature as a cultural activity, much like music or performance art. Like these things, science can enrich our lives. However, there are lots of examples in which pure science has yielded significant material benefits to mankind, sometimes many decades later. William Gladstone once asked Michael Faraday what is the use of electricity. Faraday replied “Why, sir, there is every probability that you will soon be able to tax it! “. When J.J. Thomson discovered the electron in 1897, I rather suspect that he did not think of the iPhone! But, I confess, I cannot imagine how the Higgs boson, discovered in 2012, will lead to a material benefit in 2119. But, just because I cannot imagine how doesn’t mean that someone much more imaginative than me won’t find a use for it. I doubt it, but I don’t know. When Einstein published his theory of gravity (really a theory of spacetime) in 1915, he surely did not imagine a world in which we would all be carrying devices that tell us where we are on Earth to within a meter. Our mobiles use the Global Positioning System (GPS) to do this. But, here is the amazing thing: the GPS would not work if we did not account for the warping of spacetime around the Earth! Moreover, the mathematics that describes this warping is exactly the same as that which describes black holes. Just think about this for a minute: the theory of something as esoteric as a black hole is of direct practical benefit to billions of human beings. Who would have thought? I therefore have no doubt that something will be discovered today that will change the world in 2119.