Episode 91 - Charles H. Bennett and Gilles Brassard

So bringing computer science into it makes a difference, which makes me wonder, and I am not a theorist.

My degree is not in computer science, but my degree is rather in software engineering.

And I struggle sometimes to bridge the theoretical to the practical.

And I don't understand the leap that happens or the work that happens in fundamental research and then how it turns into something that affects my daily life.

And I know that you both feel very strongly about the importance of fundamental research.

Gilles, particularly, you feel that fundamental research is something that we're going to lose sight of if we're not careful.

Is that correct?

Well, not necessarily, but it's something that has to be encouraged.

and funded because, you know, innovation and what happens in practical life is the end of a pipeline.

And a pipeline has several stages in it, including marketing, innovation, all sorts of things.

But this pipeline starts with fundamental research, by which I mean research that is curiosity driven by people who have no reason to believe that it's ever going to be useful for anything.

Research whose only purpose is to understand nature, and then maybe it will remain sort of useless forever from a practical perspective, or maybe there will be completely unpredictable application that will come up years later.

And the best example of this is the development of relativity by Einstein and quantum theory by Bohr and others in the early 20th century.

These people were doing this research purely for understanding nature, and they had absolutely no idea that a few tens of years later, the entire society would be completely transformed by their discoveries.

We would not have computers today, I mean, not electronic computers, without understanding of quantum mechanics.

And in fact, quantum theory appears in almost every gadget that you have in your life today.

And again, we thought this fundamental research that had no practical purpose whatsoever, we would not be here today.

And we would not be talking at a distance.

So, fundamental research is absolutely essential for science to continue, but also for practical applications to follow.

Sometimes, sometimes not.

But you don't know in advance, so you have to continue anyways.

I think

the part of this that I would like to emphasize is that the

reason it should be driven by curiosity is because if you try to make the basic research discoveries that you need in order to build something that you want to build, you will probably miss what turns out eventually to be important.

Interesting.