The Power of "Useless"
By Darrell Lee
In our modern, metrics-obsessed world, we are conditioned to ask one question of any endeavor: "What's the use?" We demand a clear, immediate, and preferably profitable return on investment. If a line of inquiry cannot be justified on a balance sheet, it is often dismissed as "esoteric," "ivory tower," or, most damningly, "useless." We have little patience for the dreamer, the philosopher, or the physicist who spends a lifetime chasing abstract equations. Why, after all, should society fund someone to ponder "the mind of God"?
Into this impatient world steps Michio Kaku’s "The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything," a book that, on its surface, is a thrilling history of physics. Kaku, a renowned theoretical physicist and a masterful science communicator, guides us on a grand tour of the cosmos, from Newton’s apple to the vibrating, multidimensional world of string theory. He frames this journey as a single, millennia-long quest for one elegant, all-encompassing equation that will unite the four fundamental forces of nature. But in doing so, Kaku has unintentionally written something far more practical: the single greatest defense of "useless" scientific research ever compiled. "The God Equation" is a spectacular, uplifting, and often hilarious ledger of humanity's greatest debts. It proves beyond any doubt that the most revolutionary, world-changing, and wildly profitable technologies in human history all sprang from pure, curiosity-driven research with no conceivable practical application at the time. The book stands as a powerful argument that this grand quest, which today seems more "useless" than ever, must be funded by public, governmental capital, precisely because the private sector, with its need for a quick profit, is structurally incapable of planting the seeds for trees that take a century to bear fruit.
Kaku’s story begins in a world lit by gas and powered by horses. He introduces us to the first great unification, when Isaac Newton realized that the force that makes an apple fall is the same force that holds the Moon in orbit. This was a profound intellectual leap, but Kaku’s second unification—the merger of electricity and magnetism—provides the ultimate parable of "useless" research. Our protagonist is Michael Faraday, a self-taught bookbinder’s apprentice who, in the 1830s, loved to play with wires and magnets. He discovered that moving a magnet through a coil of wire could induce an electric current.
This was, by all accounts, a parlor trick. It had no use. A famous, if perhaps fictitious, story recounts Faraday being asked by the British Prime Minister, "Of what use is this new discovery?" Faraday, with brilliant wit, supposedly replied, "Why, sir, one day you may tax it!"
He was, of course, spectacularly right. Faraday’s "useless" discovery of electromagnetic induction is the principle that runs our entire world. Every dynamo, generator, and electric motor—from the Hoover Dam to the tiny motor in your phone’s vibration function—works because of Faraday. But the story doesn't end there. Kaku introduces the second hero of this chapter: James Clerk Maxwell, a Scottish mathematician who, in 1865, took Faraday’s experimental data and, with no practical goal in mind, set out to translate it into a perfectly elegant set of equations. The resulting "theory of electromagnetism" was a dense, highly abstract work of pure mathematics. It was the very definition of "ivory tower" research.
But those equations held a secret. They predicted, with perfect accuracy, that light itself was an electromagnetic wave. More importantly, they predicted the existence of other, invisible waves, all moving at the speed of light. Decades later, Heinrich Hertz discovered these waves in his lab. A few years after that, Guglielmo Marconi figured out how to use them to send a signal across a room. Today, we call those "useless" waves radio, television, Wi-Fi, 5G, radar, and X-rays. Every single electronic, digital, and wireless technology that defines the 21st century—the entire global economy—is built on the foundation of Maxwell's "God Equation" for light. What corporation in 1865, looking for a return by the next fiscal quarter, would have funded a mathematician to write down abstract equations describing invisible waves? None. It was a quest for truth and beauty that changed humanity forever.
Kaku’s next act introduces an even more "useless" thinker: Albert Einstein. In 1905, Einstein was not working in a corporate R&D lab; he was a government patent clerk in Switzerland. He spent his days daydreaming about what would happen if you could ride a beam of light. His "useless" thought experiments led to the theory of Special Relativity, which gave rise to the most famous equation in history: E = mc^2. On paper, this was a bizarre, philosophical claim. It suggested that mass was a form of frozen energy. Who cares? The answer, as the world learned in 1945, is that this one equation is the key to unlocking the power of the atom. For better or worse, nuclear energy, which powers entire nations, was born from a patent clerk’s daydream.
But Einstein wasn’t done. He spent the next decade on an even more esoteric quest: understanding gravity. His theory of General Relativity, completed in 1915, re-imagined the universe as a four-dimensional fabric of "spacetime" that could be warped by heavy objects. This was, at the time, the single most useless theory in history. Its only practical application was correcting a tiny, imperceptible wobble in the orbit of the planet Mercury. It was a purely intellectual triumph, a new "God Equation" for gravity.
Flash forward to today. Every time you pull out your phone to use a map, you are paying direct tribute to Einstein’s "useless" theory. The GPS system relies on a constellation of satellites, each with hyper-accurate clocks. But because those satellites are moving very fast (Special Relativity) and are in a weaker gravitational field than we are (General Relativity), Einstein’s theories predict that their clocks will run faster than ours on Earth. If our phones did not constantly use Einstein’s equations of relativity to correct for this time difference, the GPS system would become inaccurate by seven miles every single day. The entire logistics, transportation, and navigation backbone of our modern society runs on a theory that, for a century, was considered the very pinnacle of esoteric, impractical thought.
Finally, Kaku brings us to the weirdest, most "useless" idea of all: quantum mechanics. The story of Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger, and Werner Heisenberg is a story of physicists arguing about concepts that seemed to defy all common sense—cats that are simultaneously alive and dead, particles that exist only as "probability waves" until we look at them, and an Einstein who famously grumbled, "God does not play dice." This was not science in the practical sense; it was a bizarre, philosophical journey into the very nature of reality.
And yet, the entire digital revolution is built on this "spooky" physics. The "quantum leap" of an electron from one energy level to another is the principle that powers the transistor. The transistor is the microscopic switch that underlies every microchip ever made. The computer on which this essay was typed, the internet that delivers it, and the smartphone in your pocket are all direct, tangible products of the weirdest, most counterintuitive theory in the history of thought. The laser, the MRI machine, and fiber optics are all purely quantum devices.
This is the central, soaring message of Kaku's book. He takes us to the frontier of today's "useless" science—his own field, string theory—which attempts to unify all these forces into a single equation. Critics dismiss it as "philosophy," as "not even wrong," because it makes no testable predictions and has no practical use. But that is precisely the point. "The God Equation" teaches us that history laughs at our impatient demands for "usefulness." The "useless" research of today is the GPS, the internet, and the cancer-curing MRI of tomorrow.
This is why government funding for basic, "blue-sky" research is not a luxury; it is the single most critical investment a society can make in its future. A private corporation, beholden to shareholders and quarterly reports, cannot and will not fund a project that has no clear path to monetization for 50 or 100 years. The private sector is designed to optimize and apply existing knowledge. It is brilliant at building a better smartphone. It is incapable of discovering the quantum mechanics that makes the smartphone possible. Only the patient, long-term, non-profit-driven capital of public, government-funded research can provide that. By funding our universities, our national labs, and our most brilliant, eccentric dreamers, we are not wasting money; we are planting the seeds for a future we cannot even imagine. Kaku’s quest for a final theory is a reminder that the true engine of human progress is—and has always been—pure, unadulterated, and glorious curiosity.
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Darrell Lee is the founder and editor of The Long Views, he has written two science fiction novels exploring themes of technological influence, science and religion, historical patterns, and the future of society. His essays draw on these long-standing interests and apply a similar analytical lens to politics, literature, artistic, societal, and historical events. He splits his time between rural east Texas and Florida’s west coast, where he spends his days performing variable star photometry, dabbling in astrophotography, thinking, napping, scuba diving, fishing, and writing, not necessarily in that order.