It's nothing new—politicians complain about silly science projects funded by the government to get taxpayers riled up. I get it. You might think super expensive particle accelerators or even dirt-cheap experiments on the color of petunias are a waste of money.
OK, you’re coming from a business perspective. But even if you care only about money in and money out, if you account for all the downstream effects—which no one can foresee—these projects often do pay off. (Read about the petunias!) Let me tell you about another silly little experiment that turned out to have an extremely high ROI.
Hertz’s Experiment
In 1862, James Clerk Maxwell published his famous Maxwell’s equations. This was at a time when humans were just starting to play around with batteries and electric currents. The first two of these four equations described the electric and magnetic fields around stationary charges.
The next equation comes from a cool phenomenon. If you take a magnet and move it near a coil of wire, you can create an electric current. Here's what that looks like:
This current is caused by an electric field inside the wire, so we could say that a changing magnetic field produces an electric field. But how do you make a magnetic field? Two ways: First, an electric current flowing in a wire makes a magnetic field. You can see this if you connect a wire to a battery and place it over a magnetic compass:
This is the basic idea behind an electromagnet. But Maxwell added a second mechanism—a changing electric field. In other words, he said, it works both ways: A changing magnetic field creates an electric field, and a changing electric field creates a magnetic field.
And here’s why this was such a big deal: This suggested that changing electric and magnetic fields would create an oscillation that can travel through space: an electromagnetic wave. Well, that was the idea, but for years it remained unproven.
Then, in 1888, Heinrich Hertz created his little experiment. He used an oscillating electric current to create a spark that jumped across a gap in a wire. According to the theory, this spark would produce changing electric and magnetic fields that should propagate through space.
So he set up a second loop of wire with a gap—only this one wasn’t attached to any power source. But looking closely, you could see that a second spark was created in this gap. Spooky! It showed that electromagnetic waves were real and they could travel across a room. (Early radio transmitters like Marconi’s used this same spark-gap method.)
Build Your Own Wave Machine
You can do this yourself. I mean, it's been like 150 years, so you probably have access to stuff that Hertz didn’t have—like Legos. Here's what you need: some wire, an old barbecue lighter, and a light bulb. (I used a tiny neon bulb, but an LED works too.) The lighter has a piezoelectric crystal inside that can produce large voltages when compressed. That's what happens when you pull the trigger—the voltage creates a spark that ignites the fuel as it leaves the lighter. I removed the old fuel container and connected the piezoelectric to two wires.
In back there’s another pair of wires with the bulb in between them. The key point here is that, like in Hertz’s loop, these back wires are not connected to any power source. Here’s the setup:
The lighter creates a tiny spark that jumps from one wire to the other in the front pair. This spark creates electromagnetic waves, with the two wires serving as transmission antennas to amplify the waves. The two wires in back are the receiving antennas, and they will produce an electric current just like with Hertz’s loop of wire. Instead of creating a spark on the receiver, on my device the light bulb will turn on. The neon bulb is really nice since it's high-voltage but low-current, which is exactly what we need.
OK, lights out! Here's what it looks like when you fire that spark.
It might seem trivial, but it's not. You are actually both sending and receiving electromagnetic waves.
Science, What Is It Good For?
When Hertz showed his experimental verification of Maxwell's equations, the science community knew it was cool, and the general public got curious. Journalists, naturally—ever the pragmatists—asked him what it could be used for. His reply:
“It's of no use whatsoever … this is just an experiment that proves Maestro Maxwell was right—we just have these mysterious electromagnetic waves that we cannot see with the naked eye. But they are there.”
Why waste money on experiments if they’re not useful? Well, the honest truth is, that’s not why we do science. Human nature makes us explorers. We ask questions and seek answers. It's just one of the things that make us who we are. Sometimes the answers are wrong (turns out the sun does not cross the sky in a chariot drawn by white horses), but we’re always looking for better ones.
And sometimes science is accidentally useful. In fact, you are likely using the results of Hertz’s experiment right now. He not only showed that Maxwell's equations were legit, he effectively invented the first radio transmitter. (Radio waves are just a slice of the electromagnetic spectrum.) This was then used for the wireless telegraph that allowed people to communicate with ships out at sea using Morse code. After that, people figured out how to send music and soap operas and commercials via radio waves, such that we now just call it “radio.” There was also this thing called television that could broadcast moving pictures through space.
But it doesn’t stop there! Since the device sends out electromagnetic waves that reflect off objects, you can measure how long it takes for the signal to come back, which tells you how far away they are—i.e., radar and lidar, which is used in self-driving cars. And of course, cell phone transmissions, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth are all electromagnetic waves. It's literally everywhere—you’re swimming in a sea of electromagnetic waves.
So if the US spends money on science, will it boost profits and economic growth? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. There are many cool discoveries with no real application. I mean, look at gravitational waves detected from colliding black holes. Will that lead to a new type of internet or something? Probably not. But we’re definitely richer for knowing about it.
