1. From a practical pov, pure intellectual life is seen as a useless pursuit.
2. One marked by a sense of self-indulgence, self-satisfaction and useless knowledge.
3. But historically, it's the pursuit of useless knowledge that's been the source of utility.
4. Take the Scottish mathematician Clerk Maxwell's enthusiasm for abstract equations.
5. Maxwell went onto publish a full treatise on abstract equations in electromagnetism.
6. Which led to the German physicist Heinrich Hertz's detection of wireless magnetic waves.
7. But the Italian engineer Guglielmo Marconi is seen as the inventor of wireless transmission.
8. Maxwell and Hertz couldn't invent anything, but it's their useless knowledge that led to something.
9. Something that was seized by a clever technician to create a new means for communication; a utility.
10. Maxwell and Hertz were geniuses without thought of use; Marconi, a technician with no thought but use.
11. Similarly, work in electric induction was done by the physicists Hans Christian Oersted and André Ampère.
12. But Michael Faraday became the father of electricity with electromagnetic induction based on their findings.
13. Oersted and Ampère were geniuses without thought of use; Faraday, a technician with no thought but use.
14. Throughout the history of science, most great discoveries were made by those who put curiosity before use.
15. For most of their careers, the Maxwells and Oersteds weren't interested in utility, but with useless knowledge.
16. And out of such useless knowledge came discoveries which proved more important than those with useful ends.
17. The point isn't that everything that goes on as self-indulgence will ultimately lead to unexpected practical use.
18. But that, as the American educator Abraham Flexner notes, it's useful to abolish the pervasion of the word use.
19. Such that the enemy of progress isn't the irresponsible thinker, but the thinker that undermines useless pursuits.