Andreas Kirschning: “On the Usefulness of Useless Knowledge – or How Free is Science Today”
- Date
- 17 March 2026, 10:15–12:00
- Location
- Thunberg Lecture Hall, Linneanum, Villavägen 6c, Uppsala
- Type
- Seminar
- Web page
- https://www.swedishcollegium.se/
- Organiser
- Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (SCAS)
- Contact person
- Mattias Bolkéus Blom
Andreas Kirschning (Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, Leibniz University Hannover & Uppsala University) will give a seminar “On the Usefulness of Useless Knowledge – or How Free is Science Today”. The seminar will be followed by a Q&A session. Hybrid event - see the webpage for the Zoom link.
ABSTRACT:
In this lecture, I make a case for basic research and explain what research conducted purely for the sake of knowledge has to do with knowledge creation and innovation.
When the polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz presented his religiously inspired dual number system in a letter written in Hanover in 1697, neither he nor anyone else saw any real use or possibility for it to be applied in practice. We know what has become of it: computers and digitalisation have completely transformed our world.
But Leibniz and his zeros and ones are not the only example of how scientific work driven by pure curiosity and without any discernible application goal can be valuable. ‘Ultimately, curiosity-driven research is the engine that leads to innovation.’
Today, this freedom is threatened by key performance indicators, impact factors and expectations of third-party funding, and has a fatal effect on the no longer so free decision of young, creative scientists as to which research topics they want to pursue.