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If this type of basic science research interests you, in the US there is a federal agency dedicated to this pursuit; the National Science Foundation (www.nsf.gov)
95% of its annual budget goes out the door in the form of research grants to colleges, small businesses and individuals. Most of the research has no immediate application but has lead to some very exciting discoveries. The biggest in the recent past was that orange donut picture of a black hole that was everywhere. ( https://new.nsf.gov/blackholes/how-are-black-holes-studied#eht)
NSF pays my salary. They are goated with the sauce
Also a ton of discoveries and inventions are on accident while looking for completely different things.
One of my favourite stories is the accidental discovery of synthetic purple dye. IIRC there was a chemist researching something completely unrelated and when he disposed some assorted chemicals down a sink he noticed they turned purple.
Also, I believe the rubber was discovered by a scientist accidentally dropping a mixture of a bunch of materials like resin onto a burner, which made it volcanize (man I hope I got the word right) into a layer of rubber in the middle
Vulcanize, haha. All good, though!
Those discoveries benefit all of us in turn. Microwave ovens, digital cameras, water filters, freeze drying, memory foam, and many other inventions we use daily were created by funding scientists to collaboratively solve problems unique to space.
And literally all of modern electronics works in no small part because of our understanding of calculus, which, in turn, wouldn’t exist if we didn’t ponder the concepts of infinities in mathematics. Which might seem like one of the most removed from reality ideas, but here we are
Thank you. As a layman, I don’t always see the bigger picture. I cannot recall the specifics right meow, but there was some sciency stuff I read about the other day and I was questioning why they would spend money on that, when there are other things to figure out. Maybe one day their results will help with something else.
I read this post and my first thought was “oh, it’s like how fans post videos of fun glitches in video games and then speedrunners sometimes end up finding a use for them in order to beat the game faster.”
Scientific progress is just glitch-hunting and speed/challenge-running.
Modern astrophysics exists because a house fell on a teenage orphan.
Who as a result got adopted by a prince.
He got access to a royal lab for glassmaking.
Then he tried fixing color aberration in his microscope lenses.
Then he noticed the rainbow had holes in it. Huh.
Then he died. Glassmaking and tuberculosis are fast friends.
Then Bunsen invented his burner, which made spectra that matched the rainbow holes. Huh.
Now we know what stars and planetary atmospheres are made of!
Fun fact, When Newton was first working on his book Opticks in the 1670s to 1704, he had a lab with prisms, magnifying glasses, and telescopes. He never once used the telescope or magnifying glass to look at the spectrum produced by the prisms he was playing with.
But his work was published and available, which let others learn and grow the field.
Newton also sort of coined the word Spectrum, or at least stole it and put it to better use.
Meta note, Tumblr etiquette sure is interesting. Abuse the tag feature, screenshot your own lengthy tags, reply to yourself and attach the screenshot.
those are most likely tags from someone without full reply permissions
Ohh thanks TIL!
Does that somehow make it better?
yes
This is what the show Connections by James Burke was about. It’s available on YouTube.
I was looking to see if this had been posted! A fascinating and essential look at how our modern civilization came to be.
All the science is connected… Except climate science. That’s voodoo witch talk and we should keep pumping millions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. WCGW?
I cannot fucking stand the fact that we live in the year 2024 and we’re having raging debates about if science has value… ON THE FUCKING GODDAMN INTERNET.
This population deserves the hardships coming, and that’s a really, really terrible thing to say, because the coming hardships are going to be bad.
“Well I think these strange scientists should stop wasting their time peering over microscopes when there’s more important things to do… you know… things that common folk like us can understand and relate to immediately” - any typical anti-reason anti-science (probably religious) dolt, ignorantly vulnerable to things like cholera because they draw their water from the same river where people piss, shit and litter upstream.
Then you’ve got the lazy scientists that discover things like penicillin and sucralose by pure accident and/or through some pretty shoddy practices.
You hear politicians question
I think what they meant to say was GOP.
And the reason for the questioning isn’t that they are worried about public funds but because they want all knowledge privately owned so they can sue competition instead of having to compete.
I think what you meant is the corporate elite and forgien governments that own all politicians.
I agree with the point of the post…
But why did that person put a hash tag at the beginning of every sentence? Maybe the weirdest punctuation usage ever
When you make or reblog a post, you can add tags at the bottom. Ostensibly these are for searching/categorization, but people often use them to write out responses to posts so that their followers can reblog the it without bringing their comment along (Tumblr just puts all replies into a single extended post so it’s a bit cumbersome to have long comment chains). The tags are visible in the “notes” section of the post, so people can still see it.
When you see a screenshot like this, it likely means that the response was made by someone else and the OP self reblogged it because they thought it was important.
Also tumblr now does have the ability to remove additions to a reblog chain but the users consider it very rude so people rarely do it.
Thanks. Can the tags contain spaces? Either way, my understanding of tags is completely broken by this
Yep, though there’s certain punctuation that will break them. I think this practice is why even regular Tumblr posts tend to have strange grammar.
Thanks for the response 👍
Ostensibly these are for searching/categorization, but people often use them to write out responses to posts so that their followers can reblog the it without bringing their comment along (Tumblr just puts all replies into a single extended post so it’s a bit cumbersome to have long comment chains). The tags are visible in the “notes” section of the post, so people can still see it.
wtf. and they say the fediverse is confusing…
deleted by creator
Tumblr has made a lot of… questionable UX decisions, but the users have found ways around them.
Something I forgot to mention as a possible origin for putting text in tags: Tumblr used to allow you to edit other peoples’ posts when you reblogged them, leading to a fear of Danny Devito and, infamously, the John Green post.
@[email protected] important addendum
You can put hashtags on your Tumblr posts. And people sometimes use it as a post scriptum
