Question: How will your discovers improve the world?

Laurence Perreault Levasseur answered on 23 Jun 2014:

The research that I do has to do with developing a better theory of nature, one that is more complete than the ones we have at the moment. So right now, it mostly involves thinking very hard and writing a lot of equations, using pen and paper – apparently the thing you like the least about science, according to your profile ;).

So, right now, what I do has close to zero consequences for the real world, the environment, the way humans live, or anything. However, it’s possible that in the future, in a way that I can’t imagine now, some people use my results to invent something very important that will greatly help the environment, cure illnesses, or improve our life quality! It might be that one day people use some of my discoveries to develop faster-than-light travel through wormholes to travel to distant parts of the galaxy 😀

This is usually how science works. Theorists develop a better understanding of nature, experimentalists test it and more applied scientists, engineers and inventors use it to develop new technology! And this has happened before! Our current theory of the infinitesimal world is called ‘quantum mechanics’. When it was developed, in the first half of the 1900s, it was completely theoretical and everyone thought that it would never have any consequences on the real world.

But then some other, more applied, scientists and some engineers came along and used that theory to invent really amazing things that eventually really changed the world: computers, internet, cellphones, electron microscopes, radiotherapy, and so many other great things! All that wouldn’t have been possible if the theorists hadn’t developed quantum mechanics in the first place.