Whoever, in the pursuit of science, seeks after immediate practical utility, may generally rest assured that he will seek in vain.
Interpretation
Pursuing science for immediate practical benefits often leads to disappointment.
Hermann Von Helmholtz implies that a genuine pursuit of scientific knowledge is not primarily motivated by immediate practical applications. Instead, true scientific inquiry may take time to yield tangible benefits, highlighting the importance of curiosity and a long-term perspective in the field of science.
In practice
This quote could be used in a science class to emphasize the intrinsic value of scientific inquiry beyond practical results.
The total quantity of all the forces capable of work in the whole universe remains eternal and unchanged throughout all their changes. All change in nature amounts to this, that force can change its form and locality, without its quantity being changed. The universe possesses, once for all, a store of force which is not altered by any change of phenomena, can neither be increased nor diminished, and which maintains any change which takes place on it.
Isolated facts and experiments have in themselves no value, however great their number may be. They only become valuable in a theoretical or practical point of view when they make us acquainted with the law of a series of uniformly recurring phenomena, or, it may be, only give a negative result showing an incompleteness in our knowledge of such a law, till then held to be perfect.
Black is real sensation, even if it is produced by entire absence of light. The sensation of black is distinctly different from the lack of all sensations.
Using e-mail, I can communicate with scientists all over the world.
To me there never has been a higher source of honour or distinction than that connected with advances in science. I have not possessed enough of the eagle in my character to make a direct flight to the loftiest altitudes in the social world; and I certainly never endeavored to reach those heights by using the creeping powers of the reptile, who in ascending, generally chooses the dirtiest path, because it is the easiest.
If you've read a lot of vintage science fiction, as I have at one time or another in my life, you can't help but realise how wrong we get it. I have gotten it wrong more times than I've gotten it right. But I knew that when I started; I knew that before I wrote a word of science fiction.
We can't any longer have the conventional understanding of genetics which everybody peddles because it is increasingly obvious that epigenetics - actually things which influence the genome's function - are much more important than we realised.
The search for knowledge is in our genes. It was put there by our distant ancestors who spread across the world, and it's never going to be quenched.
Wherever we look at the living biota … discontinuities are overwhelmingly frequent…The discontinuities are even more striking in the fossil record. New species usually appear in the fossil record suddenly, not connected with their ancestors by a series of intermediates.
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