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Message: <blockquote data-quote="freyar" data-source="post: 6667945" data-attributes="member: 40227">Yeah, I absolutely agree with both of you regarding the value of scientific research (if I didn't, I wouldn't be in this line of work, for instance!).  This was an unusual paper to come up in my morning reading, and I thought the idea was interesting enough to share...Like I said, I agree absolutely that the gain of knowledge makes it worthwhile.  I've made that argument many times myself.  But a lot of people (including politicians who make a lot of decisions about big experiments) think in terms of money.  The point of this article is to express the value of pure knowledge in financial terms and possibly more convincing to decision-makers.  Too many times, as you say, people think about only the direct financial benefit to some specific corporation or industry (that is a concern in how scientific research funding is being directed in Canada right now, for example).  This gives an argument on the pure research side to say, hey, pure knowledge is worth just as much in some quantitative way.  Also, if you look at it in more detail, the article talks about externalities, as well, so they are at least giving lip service to the idea of looking at all outcomes.Yeah, I'm no economist, so I can't evaluate the technical merits very well.  And it's certainly meant as a technical paper for at least close-to-experts, which is why they don't have a lot of the explanation, I think.  Honestly, it's not the normal thing for the physics arXiv and is probably destined for an econ journal, but I but the authors decided a physics audience would also be interested.</blockquote>

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