Justifications

I'm thinking of updating my three minute thesis talk to make roughly the point I make here.

I'm trying to work out how to justify my research. So I've heard that there are two general ways to do this. The first is by appealing to to the wonder factor: Aren't you just dying to know the answer to this question? This is how you justify the Large Hadron Collider or space expeditions. These experiments can tell us about how the universe came to be or what the origin of life is. The second option is to appeal to practical applications: We are looking for a treatment for cancer or unlimited clean energy.

These are certainly worthy topics of study, but it seems to me that there are a third class of research topics that can fall through the gap between these two justifications. They are questions that are slightly obscure and seemingly boring. But which also can not be justified by any single direct and practical application.

A nice example of this is the Schrödinger equation. Schrödinger discovered this equation while trying to discover a mathematical model that would explain the light emission of hydrogen gas. Now this sounds like an obscure, boring and not very useful topic to study. But Schrödinger's equation has turned out to be one of the most important and useful scientific equations of all time. It describes the properties of the periodic table with amazing accuracy, explaining the vast majority of the physical world with just a few symbols strung together.

It is obviously much harder to justify this kind of research, but I think it is just as, maybe even more important than the other two kinds. Wonder inducing research is certainly very nice to read about but it is very limited in terms of actual implications for our lives. Research into direct applications is fundamentally limited in usefulness as it tends to be so specific that often the results are not generalisable for any other applications.

Often the answers that are most useful are to questions about the simplest possible systems. How do we describe hydrogen, the simplest possible atom? How do we describe a ball flying through empty space. What is the link between electricity and magnetism? These questions aren't very exciting and it's not obvious what use the answers are. And yet these answers, once they were discovered, changed the world more profoundly then anyone could have imagined.

I want to work on questions like this. I think "What is the interaction of any two molecules in water?" is one of them, if we had an answer to it I think there would be massive implications for vast areas of science. But few people seem interested in this question. I had never even heard of it until I started my PhD. Popular science articles seem to focus almost exclusively on research that fits into one of the two justifications I mention above.

So I find it difficult to work out how to sell my research. On the one hand it's kind of a mundane topic, and on the other hand there's no direct applications I can point to. All I really have is a kind of long and involved argument about why answering questions about very simple physical systems is really important, which doesn't seem especially suited to the three minute thesis format.