Thanks to theoretical physics

You don't have to be a Nobel Prize winner to be excited by discoveries like the already famous gravitational waves. Advances like this, or that of the detection of the Higgs boson have the power to inspire us for the simple fact that they allow us to know our universe a little better. However, I have heard some people wonder these days how these advances, on which we spend enormous amounts of money, can benefit their daily lives. Sure, it's cool for scientists to study black holes millions of years away, but that's not going to change the way most people live, or work. Or if?

The truth is that purely theoretical studies of what we know as basic science can produce profound and surprising changes in our lives. In fact, several fundamental pillars on which our modern society rests – from satellite communication to computers, or web browsing – have been possible thanks to research that had no application, at least obviously, at the times when were carried out.

For example, about 100 years ago quantum mechanics was a purely theoretical matter, only understood by a few genius lab mice, developed to learn certain properties of atoms. His parents, scientists like Werner Heisenberg or Erwin Schrödinger, did not have any application in mind when they investigated. His impulse was, solely, to know what our world is made of. Quantum mechanics states that you cannot observe a system without modifying it by that observation, and in principle, its effects on society were more philosophical than practical. Today quantum physics is the basis of our handling of semiconductors, which make computers or mobile phones work.

At the same time that the key elements in quantum mechanics were being given, a certain Albert Einstein was trying to get a better understanding of gravity, the dominant force in the universe on a macroscopic scale. Instead of considering gravity as simply a force between two bodies, he described it as a curvature of space-time around each body, similar to the way a sheet of rubber deforms when a heavy steel ball rolls over it. This is Einstein's theory of general relativity.

As the journalist Juan Scaliter tells us, when James C. Maxwell postulated the existence of electromagnetic waves in the 19th century, it took 20 years for Heinrich Hertz to confirm their existence and become the first to produce them. Its applications began very soon: radio and television waves, microwaves, X-rays.

Closer in time, the World Wide Web was born at CERN as a way to manage the huge amounts of information produced by the institution. On April 30, 1993, CERN officially announced through the publication of a document that the web would be in the public domain, open to all and free of charge.

But in addition to potential future applications, doing basic science also has direct financial benefits. Many of the students and postdocs who work on large research projects like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) end up working in industry, where they apply their knowledge of cutting-edge technologies.

Despite these direct and indirect benefits, most theoretical physicists have a very different motivation for doing their work: they are simply interested in improving humanity's understanding of the universe. While this may not immediately affect our lives, it is an essential reason to do fundamental research. Some reasons that actually began when humans began to look at the night sky in ancient times, to ask themselves questions and to theorize about what was around them.

Throughout history, it seems that each level of scientific understanding we achieve comes with new questions. It is never enough to know what we know. And now what we have to wait is curiously what derivations will be produced from discoveries such as gravitational waves.