Question: has your work benefitted anyone?

Susan Cartwright answered on 19 Jun 2015:

Not directly, because I don’t work in a branch of science that has obvious applications in society. However, students I have trained have gone on to become teachers and medical physicists, so indirectly people have benefited. (And, as a particle physicist, I can claim partial credit for the world-wide web, which was invented to help physicists working at CERN – which I was at the time – communicate across international collaborations more effectively. But that’s cheating.)

One has, however, to be very careful in judging science by immediate benefit. Most of the things that we take for granted nowadays originated in “pure”, curiosity-driven, research: for example, when the laser was invented it was famously described as “a solution looking for a problem.” Nuclear magnetic resonance, the science behind MRI scanners (when it went into medicine it quietly dropped the n-word!), is another example of a field which was not originally developed with applications in mind. This, of course, doesn’t make neutrino physics any more useful – I am pretty confident that neutrinos are not going to solve the energy crisis or fix global warming – but it is a warning against choosing scientific problems purely on the grounds of immediate usefulness.