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Gamma-Ray Mystery Solved

Interesting, I grant you, but how will it affect the price of cheese?

Seriously- how many peoples' lives will this research touch in any useful way- even yours or mine (and we are among the interested ones).
 
Well, I don't expect that any of our research into either the physics of astronomy nor sub-atomic physics will make for better refrigerators, but that's where the interesting work is anyway. It's the quest to find out just because we want to know.

I think that we already know pretty much everything we need to know about the fundamentals, to make for better consumer products. I'm not ready to stop learning yet.
 
Nor I, Curt, though I find it harder every year.

Just sometimes, I wonder- not so much about priorities of funding, so much as priority of perceived importance in reporting. Clearly SA sees this as important enough to do an item on the various papers, yet I bet there were several discoveries this year, in many scientific fields, which will be of importance to humans in the next century or so and yet which did not attract the attention of the popular science magazines.

I recently read "New Scientist" after a gap of several years and was sad to see how little actual science it contained, compared to job ads, journalism and "celebrity" articles.

I admit I've never been a regular reader of SA- too glossy and too expensive for me.Whenever I do see it there seems to be a heavy bias towards DNA, Dinosaurs and Cosmology.

Magazines must sell, or go under. The trouble, I suppose, is that so much really important research looks desperately dull until years afterwards.
 
Well, actually...

Knowing that the short bursts are merging neutron stars, or a black hole eating a neutron star, and gaining an estimate of the frequency of such events, will help with the LIGO project. LIGO is a gravitational wave observatory, and that means that we will be able to look through its data to find whether gravitational wave events accompany these mergers as relativity predicts. This will provide more data that should help us construct a quantum theory of gravity. A quantum theory of gravity will allow us to eventually construct a complete quantum theory of all the four forces. And a complete theory of all four forces could lead to some very interesting technology indeed, depending on the details; for instance, total conversion of mass to energy; for instance, manipulation of gravitational waves, which could revolutionize civil engineering; for instance, a stardrive (not FTL, necessarily, but certainly a reasonable Bussard ramrocket); for instance, conversion of energy to mass, something we know should be possible but have no idea how to do now. Relativity looked useless too, but it turned out to be a cornerstone in the discovery and development of nuclear energy.

"Trouble rather the tiger in his lair than the sage among his books, for to you kingdoms and their armies are things mighty and enduring, but to him they are but toys of the moment, to be overturned with the flick of a finger." -- Gordon Dickson
 
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