Photo of a black hole - will it benefit?

When discussing a photo of a black hole that appeared this week, someone I knew asked a question: what does this photo have in a practical sense? The man was clearly aware that he was trying to troll, but most of all I was surprised by the answer of a smart lady from the same company: “Nothing ...”

With this approach, I do not agree, so I decided to write another note on the topic: "The practical benefits of seemingly useless research." The founders of the Nobel Prize already know this.

It seems that in the minds of many of our fellow citizens the half-laughable wording is still alive, that “science is a way to satisfy your curiosity at public expense”. It must be said that in many respects scientists, "living in an ivory tower" and reluctant to contact the press (she often reciprocates them), justify this thesis with their behavior. A great parody of such a community was brought up by Terry Pratchett in his Flat World called the Invisible University.
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However, if it were not for fundamental science, there would not be many useful things that we use in everyday life, including every day.

... One day, William Gladstone, the future British Prime Minister, asked Michael Faraday, who was studying electromagnetism:

- Why is your electricity so important?
“I don’t know for sure, but I’m sure that you will soon be able to tax it,” Faraday answered.

Actually, a note on this historical joke could have been completed, but I decided to give a few more examples. I will try to make them not as trivial as the well-known Internet, semiconductors or less well-known distributed computing.

• Matrices that were not very clear at the beginning of the 20th century found their application in the framework of quantum mechanics (the Heisenberg – Born – Jordan approach, which was contrasted with the Schrödinger differential equation). I think it is not necessary to speak about the practical application of quantum mechanics.
• When the famous BAC at CERN was designed, the technologies for maintaining ultra-high vacuum, a large number of magnets in the superconducting state, simply did not exist. But during the construction of the collider they appeared.
• In the early 1990s, a research group, in which I later worked, placed an order for the production of photomultipliers for their experiment at a Novosibirsk plant. The technology was not new, it was already worked out, but one of our orders provided the plant with work for at least one and a half years.
• At accelerators (incomparable in energy with the LHC, of ​​course), radioactive isotopes are produced not only to diagnose diseases, but also to treat certain types of cancer.
• DNA is now proposed to be used as a carrier of information for computers.
• GMOs as a real way to feed overpopulated countries.
• Entropy, migrated from statistical physics to information theory and coding.
• Of course, speaking of this or that discovery in the world of fundamental science, one can never say at once what concrete inventions it will lead to and how soon these inventions will be implemented.

Some especially hard-footed, in my opinion, comrades assert that in general any discovery can be used to the detriment of humanity, citing as an example, of course, the atomic bomb, the responsibility for which is placed solely on the scientific world. Not only for the appearance, but generally for everything. As if neither Oppenheimer with Teller on the one side of the Atlantic, nor Sakharov - on the other - never convinced anyone of anything, though to no avail. Such arguments seem to me demagogy, because here it is not far to the conclusion made by the Strugatsky brothers in "Monday begins on Saturday":

The knowledge of infinity requires infinite time. So work don't work - it's all one.

I apologize, but I avoided the topic. The example with graphene shows that what seemed absolutely impossible yesterday, today is no longer just a reality, but also routine. Newton's law of the world, Meshchersky's equation, Einstein's work on the theory of stimulated emission of atoms, the quantum Hall effect — a list of purely fundamental works that underlie something in our day for granted, can be enumerated to infinity.

So what about the use of famous photos ? Will it benefit? Well, from the photo itself, perhaps not. As well as from black holes in general (although the idea to draw energy directly from a black hole goes back to the 1980s, and with their help, you can probably make elegant gravity maneuvers to speed the spacecraft to the star of interest to us - no one there were a couple of suitable black holes for experiments?).

The very experience of integrating telescopes into a single network, synchronized many hours of observation of another galaxy, long-term processing of a vast array of data, during which, I am sure, many original algorithmic solutions were invented, and simply the cooperation of many people in different countries (it’s a pity that Russia stayed away) - it's already worth it. So wait for a new round of spam and intrusive advertising, working on the principles that were first formulated during the first photo of the black hole.
Therefore, fundamental science is an incentive for the development of applied science, and therefore technologies that will eventually appear in everyday life at low prices .

PS: Personally, I, who wrote a paper on astronomy in school just about black holes, was very pleased with the appearance of this photo. Because then such pictures were largely a figment of the imagination of illustrators of magazines like “Earth and the Universe” or “Astronomie in der Schule”. So this is not just an obvious confirmation of the general theory of relativity, which has already proven itself, but a huge step for humanity. The ability to resolve (in the optical sense: not just to see the source of the signal, but also to get some idea of ​​its structure) at a distance of 54 million light years from us is already a success. Bravo to the team that has set such an ambitious goal.