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.
As well might it be said that, because we are ignorant of the laws by which metals are produced and trees developed, we cannot know anything of the origin of steamships and railways
Something can be real - actually existing, not merely illusory - and yet not be fundamental. Scientists used to think that heat, for example, was a fluidlike substance called 'caloric' that flowed from hot objects to colder ones.
There are as many species as the infinite being created diverse forms in the beginning, which, following the laws of generation, produced many others, but always similar to them: therefore there are as many species as we have different structures before us today.
Instead, in the absence of respect for human rights, science and its offspring technology have been used in this century as brutal instruments for oppression.
It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.
When the sun is sending more energy to earth in one hour than the entire world consumes in a year, any political play to undermine our ability to harness this energy effectively and efficiently is clearly not economical but it's also unethical.
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