"I hope this recognition of fundamental science will help raise awareness of the value of blue-sky research."On the other hand, there is this, from Steven Weinberg in the New York Review of Books last year:
-- Peter Higgs, statement today after winning the Nobel Prize for Physics for his prediction of the Higgs boson
What really motivates elementary particle physicists is a sense of how the world is ordered—it is, they believe, a world governed by simple universal principles that we are capable of discovering. But not everyone feels the importance of this. During the debate over the SSC, I was on the Larry King radio show with a congressman who opposed it. He said that he wasn’t against spending on science, but that we had to set priorities. I explained that the SSC was going to help us learn the laws of nature, and I asked if that didn’t deserve a high priority. I remember every word of his answer. It was “No.”
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