1. From a practical point of view, pure intellectual life is seen as a useless pursuit.
2. One marked by a sense of self-indulgence, self-satisfaction and useless knowledge.
3. Yet historically, it is the pursuit of useless knowledge that's been the true source of utility.
4. Take the Scottish mathematician James Clerk Maxwell and his passion for abstract equations.
5. Maxwell went on to publish a full treatise on the mathematics of electricity and magnetism.
6. This led to the German physicist Heinrich Hertz's detection of wireless electromagnetic waves.
7. Yet it was the Italian engineer Guglielmo Marconi who's seen as the inventor of wireless transmission.
8. Maxwell and Hertz could not invent a thing, but their so-called useless knowledge opened the way.
9. Work that was seized by a technician who turned abstraction into a new medium of communication: a utility.
10. Maxwell and Hertz were geniuses without thought of use; Marconi, a technician with no thought but use.
11. Similarly, early work on electric induction was done by the physicists Hans Ørsted and André-Marie Ampère.
12. Yet Michael Faraday became the father of electricity through his discovery of electromagnetic induction.
13. Ørsted and Ampère were geniuses without thought of use; Faraday, a technician with no thought but use.
14. Throughout science, the greatest breakthroughs came from those who placed curiosity far above utility.
15. For most of their careers, the Maxwells and Ørsteds of the world cared less for use than for ideas themselves.
16. And out of such useless knowledge came discoveries that proved more important than those made for utility.
17. The point isn't that every act of indulgence leads to unexpected utility, only that many of the significant have.
18. So, as the American educator Abraham Flexner argued, it is useful to abolish the tyranny of the word 'use.'
19. For the true enemy of progress is not the irresponsible thinker, but the thinker who despises useless pursuits.