With the rapid accumulation of “useless” or theoretic knowledge a situation has been created in which it has become increasingly possible to attack practical problems in a scientific spirit. Not only inventors, …

What the story of the World Wide Web effectively highlights is the serendipitous nature of “useless” research; that is, the investigation driven by curiosity or to solve abstract problems without a clear, …

“Curiosity, which may or may not eventuate in something useful, is probably the outstanding characteristic of modern thinking. It is not new. It goes back to Galileo, Bacon, and to Sir Isaac …

Rather than attempting to demarcate the nebu-lous and artificial distinction between “useful” and “useless” knowledge, we may follow the ex-ample of the British chemist and Nobel laureate George …

Planned obsolescence is a strategy by which manufacturers intentionally limit the utility of their products so that consumers are forced to discard them and buy new products. Planned obsolescence creates …

Mar 24, 2017 · In it, he argued that the most powerful intellectual and technological breakthroughs usually emerged from research that initially appeared “useless”, without much relevance to real life.

Reproduced from the October issue by special permission. On April 30, 1939, under the gathering storm clouds of war, the New York World’s Fair opened in Flushing Meadows, in Queens. Its theme was …