| Thursday, July 03, 2008 |
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OCON: Q&A Session with Leonard Peikoff
By Paul Hsieh @ 11:01 PM   
As many readers know, Dr. Leonard Peikoff gave a special Q&A session for attendees of OCON 2008 on July 2, 2008. I've chosen to summarize a few selected questions, not necessarily in the order that they were asked. These are paraphrases from my notes and not verbatim quotes, so any errors or inadvertent inaccuracies are purely my own, not his. He took a mixture of nearly 40 written and spoken questions. The session lasted 90 minutes, with a 5 minute intermission halfway through.
He and the ARI established a few ground rules ahead of time. In particular, he stated that he wouldn't comment on the 2008 Presidential election. He also gave an update on the status of his forthcoming book on the DIM hypothesis as well as his podcasting activities. Overall, he was in an cheerful benevolent mood, and there were many touches of humor that I can't easily capture in this blog post. His mind was razor sharp, and it was good to see him at his best.
I don't know if an audio recording of this session will be subsequently released as a CD from the Ayn Rand Bookstore or on his podcast. If I learn more, I'll post an update.
My own comments will be in square brackets ("[]").
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Book update: The book is going both "badly" and well. It is going "badly" in the sense that he has completed a preliminary draft of the entire book, but now has to do a lot of heavy editing of the earlier chapters.
It is going well in the sense that he is now fully convinced of the correctness of his DIM hypothesis, based on the research he has done. And he is enjoying the writing process and is happy with the quality of the work. The book should be completed by Christmas 2010 at the very latest.
Podcast update: He enjoys doing the podcast tremendously. He is pleased with the quality of the questions and believes that the questions submitted are of better quality than in the past. He is also happy with the improved audio quality. He hopes that his answers are spurring his listeners to pursue some of these ideas in greater depth by looking for more information in the rest of the Objectivist literature. Also, he finds the podcasting to be a nice break from his book writing.
The podcasts will now be available on iTunes, which any users can subscribe to for free!
[I think this is terrific news, since this will make it easier to transfer files back and forth from my iPod, rather than having to do the downloads through the Peikoff.com website.]
Q) What philosophical or cultural trend is the most dangerous?
A) Religion.
Q) Will the rise of environmentalism and the subsequent loss of freedoms bring us to a society like that portrayed in Anthem?
A) Yes and no. Environmentalism does pose a danger to our freedoms. But the society depicted in Anthem is a fictional one which projects the idea of collectivism in its purest form. In our case, he believes that a different bad outcome would be more likely -- one in which we are ruled by a Pope rather than a "Council of Scholars".
Q) Who are the "low hanging fruit" most likely to be receptive to Objectivist ideas, i.e., the best targets to reach?
A) In his experience, young people between ages 17-29. Before age 17, they are generally too young and not ready to digest these ideas. After age 30, they are more likely to stop thinking as they will have finished deciding their basic values. With respect to specific professions, he's noticed that engineers, computer people, and doctors seem to be disproportionately represented in Objectivist circles.
Q) What are your favorite artworks in the following specific categories -- novel, play, painting, sculpture, and song?
A) His favorites are:Novel - Atlas Shrugged
Play - Cyrano de Bergerac
Painting - The Creation of Adam (Michelangelo)
Sculpture - The Dying Slave (Michelangelo)
Song - He doesn't know which is his favorite, but it's not "God Save the King" (the first song title that popped into his head when he heard the question). Q) As a gay Objectivist, there seem to be a disproportionate number of other gays in the Objectivist community relative to the population at large. Is there an explanation for this?
A) "Is that a problem?" [Lots of laughter, and the questioner said, no that wasn't a problem at all for him.] Basically, it's hard to know if there actually is over-representation or under-representation given the small numbers. Perhaps if there were 20 million Objectivists we could ask the question and attempt an answer. But the numbers are currently too small to attempt to answer this question or even to know if the premise is true.
Q) Is there a proper role for government in environmental issues where there are collective action questions -- for instance, issue of pollution where no single source causes a provable harm, but the aggregate of millions of polluters is a source of harm?
A) If a single polluter can be shown to be the cause of a provable harm to another, then this should be addressed through the courts -- i.e., the polluter can be sued for damages.
On the other hand, in the cases where an industrial society inherently generates in aggregate a level of pollution that may cause harm, but no single individual's pollution is a provable source of harm, then there is no role for government intervention. A person can't take the benefits of living in an industrial society (such as advanced medical technology that lets people to live to age 75 rather than dying at age 25), then also complain that the government should stop the Los Angeles smog that causes his eyes to water.
If you don't want to live in LA, then the proper response is to move away, not ask the government to impose environmental regulations.
[Obviously this opens up a number of interesting secondary issues, but he did not pursue this further.]
Q) Is the word "Shrugged" in "Atlas Shrugged" a verb or an adjective?
A) It's a verb. "I can't imagine a sentence in which 'shrugged' would be used an adjective."
Q) Is it legitimate for a person to make a career of theoretical science, without regard to practical application? Or must there be some attempt at application for this to be a legitimate activity?
A) As an individual scientist, this can be a totally legitimate activity. This can be part of a division of labor where someone pursues advances in theory without necessarily concerning himself with how it can be applied, whereas others use their minds to develop applications.
In a free society, someone concerned purely with theory might find it difficult to obtain funding, since most businesses would want to pay for research with some eventual practical applications. But if he had his own source of private funding or if that was how the division of labor was made, then this is fine.
From the perspective of man as such, it is not a legitimate endeavour to pursue pure theory without regard for any practical application that would benefit man's life in some way. But from the perspective of the individual scientist, a division of labor into theoreticians vs. applied scientists can be entirely legitimate.
Q) What is your favorite episode of The Twilight Zone?
A) The episode "A Nice Place to Visit", because of the deep philosophical content presented in an engaging way accessible to all viewers. He also likes the Twilight Zone series as a whole due to the good dialogue and characterizations, as well as brilliant plot twists.
[Larry Salzman notes that the full 30-minute episode can be found here on the CBS website. Thanks, Larry!]
Q) Do you have any advice on how to achieve cultural change for the better?
A) Nothing more than Ayn Rand has already said in her essay, "What Can One Do?". Namely, to write, speak out and advocate good ideas in the appropriate contexts.Labels: ARI, Objectivism, OCON
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| Comments on "OCON: Q" |
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 | Friday, July 4, 2008 at 0:03:32 mst
Comment ID: #1
Name: John Stark
E-mail: raistlan(at)atheist.com
URL: http://starkrelief.blogspot.com
"Q) Is the word "Shrugged" in "Atlas Shrugged" a verb or an adjective?
A) It's a verb. "I can't imagine a sentence in which 'shrugged' would be used an adjective.""
It took me a minute, but then I thought of "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned" where "woman scorned" is "a woman who was scorned", and, I think, "scorned" is used as an adjective. In this sense, if "Atlas was shrugged off by someone", someone [like a newspaper headline writer] could write "Atlas Shrugged".
Kind of unnatural, but I think it may be *possible* to have it be an adjective.
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| Friday, July 4, 2008 at 0:26:11 mst
Comment ID: #2
Name: PTL
Does anyone know if Dr. Peikoff will be making this question and answer session publicly available, as he does with his regular podcasts?
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| Friday, July 4, 2008 at 6:08:45 mst
Comment ID: #3
Name: William H. Stoddard
E-mail: whswhs(at)mindspring.com
URL: http://whswhs.livejournal.com/
"From the perspective of mankind as such, it is not a proper goal to pursue pure theory with no regard for any applications in practice that would benefit man's life in some way."
That's really a somewhat disturbing statement.
Compare the creation of works of art. Are they of any practical benefit to the human race? Do they need to be to justify their existence? Or is it sufficient that they provide us with the experience of beauty?
Well, beauty is to be found in more places than art. It's to be found in nature as well; people voluntarily make long trips to see places such as Niagara Falls or the Yosemite Valley or the Hawaiian volcanoes. And that beauty isn't confined to the parts of nature that are accessible to direct human observation. Consider the famous photograph of the Earth from space, or close-up imagery of the outer planets. The funding of the space program by government is problematic, but the chance to see those images is not devoid of value. The same could be said of images from other places that human beings are not going to inhabit, such as the tops of high mountains or the oceanic abysses. Or of the description of new living species.
Or consider theoretical science. Maxwell's equations for electromagnetic interactions are now, of course, the basis of technologies worth billions of dollars, or perhaps trillions. But when he created them, they had no economic payoff or technological application in view; they were intended purely to improve our understanding of physical phenomena in the laboratory. And yet they're one of the most stunningly beautiful achievements of the human mind, with the kind of elegance and symmetry one gets from Mozart.
One might also mention the sheer gratification of curiosity and the pleasures of knowledge. It was Aristotle who said that "All men by nature desire to know." Or, for that matter, the value of science as simple recreation. Is amateur astronomy, say, as a hobby, of any less value to humanity than chess, or stamp collecting, or foil fencing?
I think that on this point, Dr. Peikoff has either expressed himself poorly, or adopted an inappropriate perspective on the issue, one with collectivist implications that are alien to his normal mode of thought.
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| Friday, July 4, 2008 at 7:47:53 mst
Comment ID: #4
Name: Paul Hsieh
E-mail: paul(at)geekpress(dot)com
URL: http://www.geekpress.com
William Stoddard: This is a mistake on my part. Looking again at my notes, here is what I have written:
"For man as such, it should not be an endeavour to pursue pure theory without any practical application. But as a division of labor, theoreticians vs. applied scientists is entirely legitimate".
I should not have used the word "mankind" in my post, since that has a collectivist implication with Dr. Peikoff did not mean. I take full responsibility for this, and have corrected my post accordingly.
Thanks for catching that!
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| Friday, July 4, 2008 at 10:26:58 mst
Comment ID: #5
Name: LGS
E-mail: larry(at)salzman.com
Diana,
The full video of "A Nice Place to Visit" is available for free at CBS.com:
http://www.cbs.com/classics/the_twilight_zone/video/video.php?cid=6 ...
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| Friday, July 4, 2008 at 17:06:13 mst
Comment ID: #6
Name: JT
E-mail: JT30014(at)hotmail.com
I don't understand the restriction of not commenting on the 2008 presidential election. I can easily understand why Dr. Peikoff wouldn't want to spend a lot of time talking about it, but not his refusal to address it at all. I want to hear him say that the correct approach for an Objectivist is to vote for Barack Obama (or that it would have been to vote for Hillary Clinton, had she won the nomination), given what he has said in the past. Is Dr. Peikoff likely to make that statement at some other point before the election happens? Ayn Rand never shied away from taking a firm stand on a presidential election, and I don't believe her heir and the most well-known advocate of her philosophy should either.
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| Friday, July 4, 2008 at 18:13:43 mst
Comment ID: #7
Name: Burgess Laughlin
E-mail: burgesslaughlin(at)macforcego.com
URL: http://www.aristotleadventure.blogspot.com
>"Ayn Rand never shied away from taking a firm stand on a presidential election, and I don't believe her heir and the most well-known advocate of her philosophy should either."
JT, what do you mean by "shied away from"? Do you mean simply "chose not to" -- or do you mean something else?
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| Friday, July 4, 2008 at 22:25:20 mst
Comment ID: #8
Name: Paul Hsieh
E-mail: paul(at)geekpress(dot)com
URL: http://www.geekpress.com
With respect to why Dr. Peikoff requested that there be no questions on the 2008 Presidential election, he stated that he wanted this to be a pleasant evening, and he knew that he would likely get upset if this were one of the question topics. His request makes perfect sense to me, and I believed it accomplished his purpose.
(This wasn't the only topic that he and the ARI requested be off-limits. The promotional flyer also stated that he would not be fielding any questions on physics or technical epistemology.)
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| Friday, July 4, 2008 at 22:36:12 mst
Comment ID: #9
Name: William H. Stoddard
E-mail: whswhs(at)mindspring.com
URL: http://whswhs.livejournal.com/
One shrugged shoulder was eloquent of her disdain.
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| Saturday, July 5, 2008 at 7:54:39 mst
Comment ID: #10
Name: Tony Donadio
E-mail: tdonadio(at)optonline.net
William Stoddard found the following formulation disturbing: "From the perspective of mankind as such, it is not a proper goal to pursue pure theory with no regard for any applications in practice that would benefit man's life in some way."
Just briefly, I'm going to defend the original statement, exactly as it was written. I firmly believe -- and I say this as an applied scientist who works with theorists on a daily basis -- that it is *not* a proper goal to pursue pure theory, *with no regard* for any applications in practice that would benefit man's life in some way. Even theorists need to understand that the ultimate goal of theoretical research is practical application. The pursuit of knowledge simply for it's own sake, as an end in itself, is a(n unfortunately not uncommon) view that lies firmly on the "mind" side of the mind/body dichotomy.
From the perspective of a division of labor, it's legitimate to say that theoretical knowledge is a pre-requisite for practical application, and to specialize in the development of such knowledge. But the moment that someone tries to say that he's pursuing this knowledge for its own sake, and not as a (necessary) means to the end of improving man's life on earth, then I think he has ceased to be pursuing life-sustaining values as a matter of principle. He may or may not come up with theories that end up being useful on that basis -- but if he does, he does so by accident, and not as a matter of moral principle.
William then asks: "Compare the creation of works of art. Are they of any practical benefit to the human race? Do they need to be to justify their existence? Or is it sufficient that they provide us with the experience of beauty?" William, the experience provided by art *is* of practical benefit to the human race. Objectivism has a very specific view of the *practical* utility of art in human life, as a necessary means of providing man with spiritual and emotional fuel. This is described in Ayn Rand's book, "The Romantic Manifesto," as well as in Chapter 12 of Leonard Peikoff's "Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand."
Regarding your example of Maxwell's equations: as a physicist myself, I simply cannot agree that they were formulated in a context in which no regard was paid to their practical benefit to the understanding of physics. You said yourself that they were developed to "improve our understanding of physical phenomena in the laboratory." Anyone who has had to try to work with these equations in practice knows that their practical applications are immediate and obvious.
Finally, you ask: "One might also mention the sheer gratification of curiosity and the pleasures of knowledge. It was Aristotle who said that "All men by nature desire to know." Or, for that matter, the value of science as simple recreation."
I'll say flatly (and perhaps provocatively) that I think it's valueless to pursue knowledge *literally* for its own sake. As Francisco D'Anconia put it, "What For?" To the extent that I understand Aristotle's views on this point, I think that they reflect a Platonic influence, and that it is not a good one. I do think that learning or studying as a hobby, though, to which one turns for recreation and entertainment, is a different issue. Like art, these are activities which I think have a specific practical benefit to one's life.
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| Saturday, July 5, 2008 at 19:29:54 mst
Comment ID: #11
Name: William H. Stoddard
E-mail: whswhs(at)mindspring.com
URL: http://whswhs.livejournal.com/
I have to disagree with Tony Donadio's response.
To begin with, a point of general principle: I don't see that the distinction between "man as such" and "an individual scientist" is valid. An individual scientistâ€"or an individual athlete, or an individual copy editor, or an individual butlerâ€"is a unit of the concept "man." The concept includes all the attributes of individual men, not just those that follow from man's essential nature. This distinction between the individual scientist and the essence of man within that individual scientist is all too close to a theory/practice dichotomy, in which in theory it's undesirable for man as such to do purely theoretical science, but in practice it's perfectly all right for individual scientists to do so.
So consider the category of recreation, which I introduced. Individuals fence, or golf, or play bridge, or role-playing games (my own favorite recreation), or collect stamps, or first editions. These activities give pleasure to individuals, and the pursuit of pleasure is appropriate for individuals; it's part of what makes life worth living. Any one of them is optional, and we can't say that "man as such" fences, or plays bridge, or collects stamps, but we can say that "man as such" seeks pleasure, and engages in recreational activities as a source of pleasure. Perhaps we could say that "man engages in recreation for pleasure" is a general statement that includes but omits the measurements of "Bill Stoddard plays GURPS for pleasure."
Well, there are people who observe nature for pleasure: amateur astronomers, amateur naturalists who collect plants or insects or minerals, and so on. Such activities can contribute to the growth of knowledge. They represent the pursuit of scientific knowledge for its own sake, without regard for applications, as a source of pleasure. The same could be said of amateur mathematicians, who occasionally prove theorems. In our age of government subsidized science, this is less visible, but if there were no such subsidies, there would still be number theorists trying to discover interesting relationships between numbers, not for the sake of any application such as encryption, but because it gave them pleasure. So: (a) Is the pursuit of pleasure through recreation not proper to man as such, or (b) is it proper in general, but not when the recreation takes the form of pursuing knowledge for the pleasure of knowing, or (c) is the pursuit of knowledge proper to man as such?
I could make the same argument about knowledge of the natural world as a source of aesthetic pleasure, but I think the parallel should be clear.
It's true that without government subsidies, businesses would not spend much money on abstract knowledge. But activities engaged in for the sake of production are not the whole of human life. There are also activities engaged in for the sake of present enjoyment, as the reward of production. Scientific research can be either type of activity. Restricting it to only research that's going to serve a practical end is a grimly puritanical approach to it; and allowing research without a practical end as a concession to individual scientists, while saying it's not proper to man as such, is akin to the puritanism with concessions that says it's all right to do things for pleasure as long as we don't claim that we have a right to pleasure.
I enjoy knowing things, including things I have absolutely no use for knowing, such as comparative grammar, or how to calculate a Hohmann transfer orbit. I think the capacity for that sort of pleasure is part of my nature as a human being, and thus is proper to man as such. And if some people devote their lives to such studies, and achieve much more by doing so than I ever will, that's no less admirable, and no more a perversion or distortion of "man as such," than if some people devote their lives to becoming the best fencer, or sprinter, or gymnast on Earth.
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| Sunday, July 6, 2008 at 13:06:55 mst
Comment ID: #12
Name: Monica
E-mail: monicabeth10(at)gmail.com
URL: http://sparkasynapse.blogspot.com
"But the moment that someone tries to say that he's pursuing this knowledge for its own sake, and not as a (necessary) means to the end of improving man's life on earth, then I think he has ceased to be pursuing life-sustaining values as a matter of principle."
I respectfully but emphatically disagree.
I'm a systematist that has described many species of a particular group of microscopic arthropod-infecting fungi, and there are currently no practical applications in my work. I plan on working on this group of fungi for the rest of my life and as far as this *particular* line of work goes, the discovery of seeing something no human has seen before, and making my best attempts to study and understand whatever it is, is the only "life-sustaining value" I need. Their particular features, how they differ from other groups, and how they evolved are my primary interests. I'm sure this won't be the only field I pursue over my lifetime, but so far it's the only one I've dedicated my entire life to. I have plenty of other scientific pursuits that are more or less applied because of the need to earn money but they're not my primary interests.
Somehow, I rather doubt that Linnaeus had modern molecular plant biology in mind when he described Arabidopsis thaliana back in the 1700s. A. thaliana remained little but a useless weed for over 200 years, but today serves as the basis for a modern understanding of plant physiology. There are countless other examples, especially in biology, where the end result of the initial discoveries are far from obvious or even impossible to know at the time. Needless to say, Linnaeus did not describe A. thaliana for the purpose of describing a species that would serve as a workhorse for mankind, even though it's great that it has.
"I enjoy knowing things, including things I have absolutely no use for knowing... I think the capacity for that sort of pleasure is part of my nature as a human being, and thus is proper to man as such."
Absolutely.
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| Sunday, July 6, 2008 at 14:13:12 mst
Comment ID: #13
Name: Burgess Laughlin
E-mail: burgesslaughlin(at)macforcego.com
URL: http://www.aristotleadventure.blogspot.com
Do the two sides of the discussion come down to a distinction between philosophical and personal? The philosophical applies to all individuals everywhere and at all times through history. The personal applies to a particular individual.
For humans to survive, they must produce. A particular individual, say one who has inherited wealth, might still devote his life to studying a particular life form, but have no interest whatsoever in applying his discoveries or even in publishing the results to the world. His only interest is in answering the question, What is it? This is his central purpose in life.
Is such an individual moral or immoral? I would say moral.
What I would question, though, is whether it is _psychologically_ possible for such an individual, assuming he has mental health, to _not_ produce something that captures all that he has learned: a book, a video, or a lecture series. It is inconceivable to me that one would devote years of study to a subject and not want to "capture" it in some form. That is perhaps the most difficult but most rewarding stage of investigation.
If he does so, then the researcher _is_ productive in the philosophical sense. What others are able to do or choose to do with that product is another matter.
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| Sunday, July 6, 2008 at 17:39:09 mst
Comment ID: #14
Name: Monica
E-mail: monicabeth10(at)gmail.com
URL: http://sparkasynapse.blogspot.com
Burgess, I'd certainly agree that one would want to share ones' discoveries with others in the form of publications, even if one isn't able to make money that way. Seeing my work in print has been very fulfilling. I also agree with something you implied, which is that a work that synthesizes a great deal of information over a lifetime is even more fulfilling than publishing more or less disconnected papers.
However, I don't think even that type of sharing of non-applied work is the type of "life sustaining value" Tony D. is getting at. I could be wrong on that, but that's how I see the statement, and it's one I've encountered in Objectivists and even members of the general public before. As a result of encountering that attitude several times, I've done a lot of introspection on why I do what I do.
The drive to know, to fully understand all that exists, is present in all children that I've seen. Generally, that curiosity is squelched by unimaginative parents that don't seek to know themselves, the educational system filled with "educators" who are afraid to admit that they don't know something, etc. Few people retain a true curiosity about the world to adulthood. I think that people in many fields, including applied ones (it's obviously absurd to say that only those working in non-applied fields are curious), may retain this characteristic, but they are generally few.
While I agree that absent government subsidies non-applied work would be more difficult to fund, I don't believe such funding would be at all impossible. The public can finance what they like and some of these projects are not that expensive. For instance, there are huge biodiversity inventorying projects that are funded with private money. Personally, I'd see such a project as far more interesting and useful near term than sending another rover to Mars to find more ice, but if people want to fund the curiosity of geologists who get excited about white spots in their computer monitor, that's fine with me. ;)
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| Sunday, July 6, 2008 at 20:24:41 mst
Comment ID: #15
Name: Tony Donadio
E-mail: tdonadio(at)optonline.net
I'm about to leave on a vacation tomorrow morning, so I can't respond properly to the recent comments on this thread. I'll just say a couple of things briefly for now. First, in response to Monica: I did say specifically in my remarks that I regard the theory/applied science division of labor as legitimate. If a theorist had to have "currently practical applications" to justify their research, then they would cease to be theorists and become applied scientists.
I'm afraid that I don't share the view that living according to a "drive to know, to fully understand all that exists" is a virtue. To put it bluntly, there are far too many fascinating things in the world, and life is too short, to indulge that kind of indiscriminate curiosity. Any honest person has to draw the line at some point and say: "Those things over there are interesting, but they're outside the purview of what I'll ever have time for in my life."
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| Monday, July 7, 2008 at 8:50:47 mst
Comment ID: #16
Name: Monica
E-mail: monicabeth10(at)gmail.com
URL: http://sparkasynapse.blogspot.com
Tony, I agree with some of what you said, and I think that's implied by my sarcastic statement about the geologists jumping up and down about ice on Mars. ;) Clearly, we all can't be experts at everything nor would we want to be. I'd be bored to death studying ice on Mars. My curiosity has limits. Further, the vast majority of people do not want to be scientists, let alone non-applied ones. However, indiscriminate curiosity on the part of *each individual* is not implicated in man's quest to fully understand the universe, and nothing I've said implies that the curiosity must be indiscriminate.
As for the drive to fully understand all that exists, I don't think it's a major virtue on the part of individuals as such, but it obviously part of man's mechanism of survival. It's essentially the beginning step in producing anything. I think this statement from OPAR (I don't remember where exactly this is found, but it's something I copied down a long time ago) lends support to my view: "In order to produce, man must discover the types of materials available in nature, the potentialities they possess, the laws of their behavior, the techniques by which they can be reshaped into the sustenance of human survival..."
Speaking just about the field of biology (because I'm not very knowledgeable about other branches of science), there's still an enormous amount to discover with the current methods (up to 95% of species on Earth still estimated to be unknown to science), and only a miniscule percentage of the *described* species, about 200 out of 1.5 million, have had their genomes sequenced. And most of those organisms have tiny genomes that don't take too much time, relatively speaking. In short, the concept of division of labor doesn't even really apply in our lifetimes in the sense that one person describes something and another person starts studying its physiology and genetics two years down the road. The lag time is pretty enormous. Only the exceptional scientists like Craig Venter organize projects that work on both applied and theoretical aspects, but even they bring in far more information than they can reasonably deal with in any applied way.
Given these facts as far as biology is concerned, I think it's reasonable for a person to ask why people should be spending time and money on non-applied biological science at this point. The best answer I can give, since I can't reasonably assert that every discovery is going to turn into a practical application in my lifetime or even 200 years from now, is that some people like what they do and they're better at it than they would be at various applied aspects, and that such knowledge furthers our understanding of the world in ways that can't be anticipated beforehand. While I've heard many scientists say they are studying such things "for their own sake" I don't think that's a completely accurate statement of most of their motivations, if they were to just think about it some more. Most of them at least study for their own pleasure and the vast majority share their discoveries -- even if it is outside of any economic benefit in the form of book sales and such.
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