In an editorial column published in Tuesday’s Journal-World, President William Walker of Auburn University called for research that will “demonstrably promote economic development.” This attitude is particularly dangerous to our country’s future, for it may cause us to reduce funding for that which will bring new technologies.

If we look to the 19th century, we can identify research that led to important modern technology. To cite one example, the electromagnetic research led by Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell gave us now-familiar devices such as the electric light, telephone, electric motor, radio, and television. All this work was of no obvious social value at the time, and, in fact, Faraday’s work was questioned as useless by a government official.

To give another example, astronomers seeking to understand light coming from the stars built a database of spectra, which led to the development by physicists of an abstract theory called quantum mechanics, and our understanding of atoms, making modern chemistry possible. This theory is also at the basis of most present “new technology” based on lasers, miniaturized electronics, and of course computers.

A monk, Gregor Mendel, curious about why and how pea plants inherited flower color and other characteristics, laid the foundation for modern genetics. This will have increasing impact in the future, particularly in medicine.

What would have constituted “useful” research in the society of 1880? Any scientist whose basic work had anything to do with the formation of boiler scale in steam engines would have had an edge. Factory power was usually belt-driven, so anything in mechanics relating to belt-drive efficiency would be big. The telegraph was clearly important, so any coding work offering a new, more efficiently tapped-out replacement for Morse code would be targeted as useful.

Studies in buoyancy (and in producing hydrogen) would be extremely important, to prepare for the great 20th-century travel mode of balloons/dirigibles lying ahead. (Helium, the gas used now for safety reasons in many balloons, is another discovery made in astronomy.)

We can never know what is strategic more than a few short years ahead. We therefore are likely to waste our money on “useful” research, as the society of 1880 would have done, for the most part. Its usefulness lasts only a few years at most.

On the other hand, the return on basic research is high — 28 percent annual interest, according to a Congressional Budget Office report. This includes the cost of all the projects that come to nothing; the big payoffs are so big that they change the world forever.

It is natural for Dr. Walker to wish for an emphasis on research topics which are easy to explain to legislators as important. We must avoid the temptation to stop there, for this shortchanges society.

We can do no less than take on the task of explaining the value of basic research, which provides the possibility of learning truly new things, and of defending the role of researchers primary mission is to do it.

— Adrian Melott is a professor of Physics and Astronomy at Kansas University and a fellow of the American Physical Society.