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AnonTechie writes:

You don't have to be a scientist to get excited about breakthroughs in theoretical physics. Discoveries such as gravitational waves and the Higgs boson can inspire wonder at the complex beauty of the universe no matter how little you really understand them.

But some people will always question why they should care about scientific advances that have no apparent impact on their daily life – and why we spend millions funding them. Sure, it's amazing that we can study black holes thousands of light years away and that Einstein really was as much of a genius as we thought, but that won't change the way most people live or work.

Yet the reality is that purely theoretical studies in physics can sometimes lead to amazing changes in our society. In fact, several key pillars on which our modern society rests, from satellite communication to computers, were made possible by investigations that had no obvious application at the time.

[...]

This motivation may well have begun when humans first looked up at the night-sky in ancient times. They wanted to understand the world they lived and so spent time watching nature and creating theories about it, many of them involving gods or supernatural beings. Today we have made huge progress in our understanding of both stars and galaxies and, at the other end of the scale, of the tiny fundamental particles from which matter is built.

It somehow seems that every new level of understanding we achieve comes in tandem with new, more fundamental questions. It is never enough to know what we now know. We always want to continue looking behind newly arising curtains. In that respect, I consider fundamental physics a basic part of human culture.

Now we can wait curiously to find out what unforeseen spin-offs that discoveries such as the Higgs boson or gravitational waves might lead to in the long-term future. But we can also look forward to the new insights into the building-blocks of nature that they will bring us and the new questions they will raise.

http://theconversation.com/whats-the-point-of-theoretical-physics-54493

[Related]: Five ways particle accelerators have changed the world (without a Higgs boson in sight)

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