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The most fascinating thing about science is the ideas,

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it's the lifting of the human spirit.

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We can justify what we do by the technological spinoffs,

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and it's true General Relativity is esoteric, but you couldn't use your GPS machine without it.

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Turns out the effects of General Relativity into satellites have to be incorporated,

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if not, within a second you'd lose all knowledge of where you were on Earth with the GPS satellites, so

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it's true that even the most esoteric ideas sometimes have technological spinoffs,

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but I think it is misplaced to argue for doing fundamental research just because of these technological spinoffs.

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The questions themselves have to be worth asking to be able to spend the money on it,

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but having said that, it is absolutely true that our current standard of living

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vitally depends on the curiosity-driven research that was done a generation or two before.

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Discoveries come along that change everything when you didn't expect it,

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and they come along because you didn't know what you were looking for,

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and if we stop investing in fundamental research now,

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it is true that our standard of living a generation from now, our children,

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the legacy we leave our children, will be much poorer,

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and in fact, it's one of the reasons why I argue that not just to live off selling natural resources,

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but to think about the future, about doing fundamental research,

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because the countries that are going to be able to compete in the XXI Century are those that are best at technology and ideas, and research.

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So there is of course, not just this altruistic, idealistic notion of understanding the Universe,

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if we want to address the challenges of the XXI Century, from energy and climate change,

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we need to invest in fundamental research now.

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I'm always worried about predictions about the future,

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and people always ask me what's the next big thing, and I say if I knew I'd be doing it,

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but what I'm convinced of, is that the most important things that we know 50 years from now,

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will be things we have no idea about right now.

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Nature continues to surprise us in ways we could never have expected.

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Nature is much more imaginative than the human imagination is,

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and in order to make progress, we keep having to question nature, explore it,

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because it will yield those surprises that will change, not just our picture of ourselves,

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but the way we carry out our lives.

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As far as I know, people don't ask the question:

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"What's the value of a Mozart symphony or a Picasso painting?"

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Science is a cultural activity,

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and it's produced some of the most amazing ideas that humans have ever thought about.

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And the cultural value of science, of understanding where we are, where we come from,

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is the same as art, music and literature. Great art, music and literature forces us to reasess our place in the Cosmos.

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That's what science does at its best, and if we are so empoverished that we have to stop asking questions,

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but where we come from and we're we going, it's indeed a sad time.

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These are the most interesting questions the humans have ever asked,

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and by comparison to the money we spend in many other things, that is, in my opinion, much more useless,

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the investment is very small.

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And so, if we are at the point where we have to say: "look, we can't stop asking these esoteric questions,

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that change our picture of ourselves, then it's a sad time for humanity.