The privilege of being a physicist

THERE ARE CERTAIN obvious privileges that a physicist enjoys in our society. He is reasonably paid; he is given instruments, laboratories, complicated and expensive machines, and he is asked not to make money with these tools, like most other people, but to spend money. Furthermore he is supposed to do what he himself finds most interesting, and he accounts for what he spends to the money givers in the form of progress reports and scientific papers that are much too specialized to be understood or evaluated by those who give the money—the federal authorities and, in the last analysis, the taxpayer. Still, we believe that the pursuit of science by the physicist is important and should be supported by the public. In order to prove this point, we will have to look deeper into the question of the relevance of science to society as a whole. We will not restrict ourselves to physics only; we will consider the relevance of all the natural sciences, but we will focus our attention on basic sciences, that is to those scientific activities that are performed without a clear practical application in mind.