In 1969, Robert Wilson director of the National Accelerator Laboratory, was testifying before Congress. He sought funding for a particle accelerator (forerunner of the large Hadron collider at Cern where the Higgs Boson was discovered in 2012).   Asked how his project would help defeat the Russians, he responded ‘It only has to do with the respect  with which we regard one another….. are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets….   this new knowledge has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to help make it worth defending’.

       This position requires occasional reaffirmation.  It is sad that Senator Tom Coburn (Rep-Oka) is stepping down because of ill health, but less sad that he is stepping down.  The blend the Tea Party brew is rather weak for  Senator Coburn, who believes research should be useful and has firm views of what is useful. Research into how we ride bicycles (a particularly interesting subject, in my view:  most people can, a few can’t, and neither those who can nor those who can’t, really understand how or why).  If Mort Hubbard of UC Davis can tell us how, he deserves a medal if not a Nobel Prize, though his bicycling robots  are  easy to mock.

But Senator Coburn’s greatest ire was reserved for the funding of political science.  He believes that people who want to understand politics can watch Fox News – yes, seriously, though he conceded that some  might prefer to pay attention to CNN and MSNBC.  Last year, he tagged an amendment to an omnibus bill which blocked grant funding to academic research in this  field.  But American political scientists are rejoicing this month; the prohibition lapsed in the latest Congressional budget compromise.

Politicians  can always win cheap laughs by reading out the titles of research projects they do not understand.  In the early Thatcher years, Keith Joseph tried to abolish the Social Science Research Council, but a report commissioned from Victor Rothschild failed to deliver the verdict he wanted. 

      Rothschild used the  example. of  research on ‘kinship and sex roles in a Polish village’. ,a project description which  had provoked much merriment in the Public Accounts Committee. A respondent pointed out that the work showed how the inefficiency of fragmented land holdings increasingly tended by ageing women gave rise to economic cost and political tensions.  We now know that such tensions grew in Poland in the following decade.  And then the Wall came down.

   Anthropology helps us understand the world, in ways that are helpful whether we are talking about the internal contradictions of communism or the pathologies of financial crises. And ideas frame the world in which we live.  Stalin supposedly laughed at Papal criticism, asking ‘how many divisions does the Pope have?’.  In the long run the Pope proved more powerful than Stalin.

The British Academy last week published an explanation of the rationale for research in humanities and social sciences. (Full disclosure – I feature in a case study).  But what is the purpose of studying history and literature?   Because history (real and imagined) and literature make us what we are.  Jonathan Bate, the literary scholar, quotes the Duke of Marlborough as saying ‘the English get their history from Shakespeare and their theology from Milton’, and perhaps they do.  No doubt the grain merchants of Athens asked what Plato was doing to improve their harvests, and the goldsmiths of Pisa, their feet firmly on the ground, asked Galileo what use was gravity.  The philistine fixation with temporary utility is swamped in the long run by the enduring power of ideas.  And just one discovery like calculus, gravity or democracy will pay for a lot of research.

Of course, there is a lot of bad and useless research.  But it is difficult, as the Polish example illustrates well, to decide which research is useless, or how research will influence our lives.  The most immediately practical application of particle physics research had nothing to do with particle physics at all:  the worldwide web began as a means of enabling the scientists engaged in that research to keep in touch with each other.

Senator Pastore, questioning Robert Wilson, was not small-mindedly asking what particle physics would do for the shopkeepers of Rhode Island.  He was throwing an easy ball to a scientific leader whose objectives he supported.  Perhaps we need a Senator Pastore in place of a Senator Coburn.