“If basic research adds to our stock of knowledge it is worthwhile. That’s why you do basic reserch even if the knowlege doesn’t make a whit of practical difference. I really shouldn’t have to explain that to a PhD in molecular biology.”
Of course many great discoveries resulted from trivial investigations. But, there is enormous waste in academic research. Very few within these disciplines are willing to state this. Resource allocation is an important issue in an era of limited resources. We simply cannot study anything and everything for the sake of adding to our “stock of knowledge”. If you don’t agree then you sanction departments of women’s and Africana studies, or BS investigations into environmental studies that are more political then scientific. Even basic molecular biology is laden with silly and unimaginative projects.
Any hard science research that adds to our understanding of the physical world has merit. None of it is silly. How you evaluate any piece of research in the scheme of things depends on your intests.
And even if you insist on judging research by what useful technology it spawns, you can never tell. A seemingly insignificant finding might be the first link in a long chain that ends in a world changing finding. Or a piece of research might sit on a shelf for a century until some new discovery makes it vital.
In mathematics (not physical but a hard science) boolean logic was a pure abstract concept with no practical use in the real world. Any layman looking at Boole's work would have called it silly, a waste of time. Until people started thinking about automatic computing. Then it became core of the technology that civilization is built on.
No, no hard science research is silly.