The utility of physics

In a recent blog post about  the utility of physics the case was made that we physicists should not be shy about making it known to the world how physics research has been turned into really useful technology that we like to use without realising where it has come from. I'm all for an honest appraisal about how pertinent physics is. Unfortunately I dont think it is as straightforward as might appear. You see its all tarnished by the politics of funding. You coat the history of technology with a varnish of being physics and it gives funding reviewers a warmer feeling that physics research will lead to something. Its all part of the game that plays at spending billions on fundamental research that has a follow through into wider society where the research has applications for....(enter whatever topic is currently in vogue). Particle physics is particularly suscepticle to this. Particle physics has been spending billions for decades on fundamental research that is frankly only understood by those physicists working in the field. Yes the research looks at the most fundamental properties of nature, but so far the LHC has been extremely successful at finding a particle we have been expecting to find for over 20 years and comfimed that the "standard model" (the most inappropiate name for a theory of 'everything')  is correct - except that it isn't! The justification for spending huge amounts of resource  is generally given in terms of the trickledown tecnology  with such things as medical scanners and the internet being claimed as resulting from the particle physics research. But this is a little disingenuous. It's certainly true that the germ of the idea originated as a consequence of fundamental research - particularly for  medical scanners - but both the particle physics and nuclear physics communities claim credit for this and use it as part of their justifcation to carry on fundamental research. It has to be trickle down technology because paticle physics is now at such a universal extreme that there are few places in the universe where it might actually be useful, so the results of the research itself will probably never be widely used (but what we really want to  know is will it lead to the development of warp drive!).  Turnng the concept into something useful is generally done through a tremendous amount of hard work on the part of development engineers , not physicists - and that in itself is a very important point. Often it is the physicists who are the concievers or the catalysts that can spark off new ideas.

All technology operates on fundamental physical principles. Just because and iphone uses a chip that uses a transistor, or a camera that makes use of optics, or a MEMS based accelerometer doesn't mean that physics lead to the iphone.  Everything uses physics somewhere.    The economics and politics of scientific research now mean that every grant application has to state that there will be technological and economic impact that results from this work, and sensibly, this cannot be so. Every month I read dozens of articles on sites like  physorg   where the culmination of piece is to say this could find application in ..., usually a quantum computer. Its clear that this cant be true in every case   and yet is every funding body expecting this? How long should we expect to wait?  Superconductivity was going to transform power distribution when relatively high temperature opration was discovered in the late 1980's, but this has proved to be an impractical dream so far. In fact the best use of supeconductivity so far is to provide the magenetic field for the LHC (and that use liquid He so is not high temperature). Nuclear fusion has been sold as the dream for supplying cheap energy but it is always 30 years away, and has been for 50 years.
I am a firm believer that physics is everywhere and an understanding of physics is a creative technological source.  So lets have a better understanding of the place of physics within technology, not an uncomfortable cherry picking of certain high profile scientific technologies. We should of course grasp the concept that knowledge is important for its own sake. If we want to impress upon people why physics in general is a worthwhile activity then we should compose a magnificent list of the places where physics is used in the things we find in modern society. I may start this list for myself but I expect it to be very long.