受此贴启发：https://bbs.pinggu.org/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=2575

不建议读第四（IV）部分，纯属学校宣传单。时间紧，看到II，其主旨就明晰了。

以下为主要内容：（找到了Steve Jobs在Stanford University演讲中他的第一个故事的源头{:soso_e100:}，参：
http://www.ted.com/talks/steve_jobs_how_to_live_before_you_die.html 或
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html）

Harper's magazine, issue 179, June/November 1939
The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge
Abraham Flexner

Is it not a curious fact that in a world steeped in irrational hatreds which threaten civilization
itself, men and women - old and young - detach themselves wholly or partly from the angry current
of daily life to devote themselves to the cultivation of beauty, to the extension of knowledge, to the
cure of disease, to the amelioration of suffering, just as though fanatics were not simultaneously
engaged in spreading pain, ugliness, and suffering? The world has always been a sorry and confused
sort of place - yet poets and artists and scientists have ignored the factors that would, if attended
to, paralyze them. From a practical point of view, intellectual and spiritual life is, on the surface,
a useless form of activity, in which men indulge because they procure for themselves greater
satisfactions than are otherwise obtainable. In this paper I shall concern myself with the question
of the extent to which the pursuit of these useless satisfactions proves unexpectedly the source
from which undreamed-of utility is derived.
We hear it said with tiresome iteration that ours is a materialistic age, the main concern of which
should be the wider distribution of material goods and worldly opportunities. The justified outcry
of those who through no fault of their own are deprived of opportunity and a fair share of worldly
goods therefore diverts an increasing number of students from the studies which their fathers
pursued to the equally important and no less urgent study of social economic and governmental
problems. I have no quarrel with this tendency. The world in which we live is the only world
about which our senses can testify. Unless it is made a better world, a fairer would, millions will
continue to go to their graves silent, saddened, and embittered. I have myself spent many years
pleading that our schools should become more acutely aware of the world in which their pupils and
students are destined to pass their lives. Now I sometimes wonder whether that current has not
become too strong and whether there would be sufficient opportunity for a full life if the world were
emptied of some of the useless things that give it spiritual significance; in other words, whether
our conception of what is useful may not have become too narrow to be adequate to the roaming
and capricious possibilities of the human spirit.


We may look at this question from two points of view: the scientific and the humanistic or
spiritual. Let us take the scientific first. I recall a conversation which I had some years ago with
Mr. George Eastman on the subject of use. Mr. Eastman, a wise and gentle farseeing man, gifted
with taste in music and art, had been saying to me that he meant to devote his vast fortune to the
promotion of education in useful subjects. I ventured to ask him whom he regarded as the most
useful worker in science in the world. He replied instantaneously: “Marconi.” I surprised him by
saying, “Whatever pleasure we derive from the radio or however wireless and the radio may have
added to human life, Marconi’s share was practically negligible.”
I shall not forget his astonishment on this occasion. He asked me to explain. I replied to him
somewhat as follows:
“ Mr. Eastman, Marconi was inevitable. The real credit for everything that has been done in
the field of wireless belongs, as far as such fundamental credit can be definitely assigned to anyone,
to Professor Clerk Maxwell, who in 1865 carried out certain abstruse and remote calculations in
the field of magnetism and electricity. Maxwell reproduced his abstract equations in a treatise
published in 1873. At the next meeting of the British Association Professor H. J. S. Smith of
Oxford declared that ‘no mathematician can turn over the pages of these volumes without realizing
that they contain a theory which has already added largely to the methods and resources of
pure mathematics.’ Other discoveries supplemented Maxwell’s theoretical work during the next
fifteen years. Finally in 1887 and 1888 the scientific problem still remaining - the detection and
demonstration of the electromagnetic waves which are the carriers of wireless signals - was solved
by Heinrich Hertz, a worker in Helmholtz’s laboratory in Berlin. Neither Maxwell nor Hertz had
any concern about the utility of their work; no such thought ever entered their minds. They had no
practical objective. The inventor in the legal sense was of course Marconi, but what did Marconi
invent? Merely the last technical detail, mainly the now obsolete receiving device called coherer,
almost universally discarded. ”
Hertz and Maxwell could invent nothing, but it was their useless theoretical work which was
seized upon by a clever technician and which has created new means for communication, utility,
and amusement by which men whose merits are relatively slight have obtained fame and earned
millions. Who were the useful men? Not Marconi, but Clerk Maxwell and Heinrich Hertz. Hertz
and Maxwell were geniuses without thought of use. Marconi was a clever inventor with no thought
but use.
The mention of Hertz’s name recalled to Mr. Eastman the Hertzian waves, and I suggested
that he might ask the physicists of the University of Rochester precisely what Hertz and Maxwell
had done; but one thing I said he could be sure of, namely, that they had done their work without
thought of use and that throughout the whole history of science most of the really great discoveries
which had ultimately proved to be beneficial to mankind had been made by men and women who
were driven not by the desire to be useful but merely the desire to satisfy their curiosity.
“Curiosity?” asked Mr. Eastman.
“Yes,” I replied, “ curiosity, which may or may not eventuate in something useful, is probably


the outstanding characteristic of modern thinking. It is not new. It goes back to Galileo, Bacon,
and to Sir Isaac Newton, and it must be absolutely unhampered. Institutions of learning should
be devoted to the cultivation of curiosity and the less they are deflected by considerations of
immediacy of application, the more likely they are to contribute not only to human welfare but to
the equally important satisfaction of intellectual interest which may indeed be said t have become
the ruling passion of intellectual life in modern times. ”


II
What is true of Heinrich Hertz working quietly and unnoticed in a corner of Helmholtz’s
laboratory in the later years of the nineteenth century may be said of scientists and mathematicians
the world over for several centuries past. We live in a world that would be helpless without
electricity. Called upon to mention a discovery of the most immediate and far-reaching practical
use we might well agree upon electricity. But who made the fundamental discoveries out of which
the entire electrical development of more than one hundred years has come?
The answer is interesting. Michael Faraday’s father was a blacksmith; Michael himself was
apprenticed to a bookbinder. In 1812, when he was already twenty-one years of age, a friend took
him to the Royal Institution where he heard Sir Humphrey Davy deliver four lectures on chemical
subjects. He kept notes and sent a copy of them to Davy. The very next year, 1813, he became
an assistant in Davy’s laboratory, working on chemical problems. Two years later he accompanied
Davy on a trip to the Continent. In 1825, when he was thirty-four years of age, he became Director
of the Laboratory of the Royal Institution where he spent fifty-four years of his life.
Faraday’s interest soon shifted from chemistry to electricity and magnetism, to which he de-
voted the rest of his active life. Important but puzzling work in this field had been previously
accomplished by Oersted, Amph`ere, and Wollaston. Faraday cleared away the difficulties which
they had left unsolved and by 1841 had succeeded in the task of induction of the electric current.
Four years later a second and equally brilliant epoch in his career opened when he discovered
the effect of magnetism on polarized light. His earlier discoveries have led to the infinite number
of practical applications by means of which electricity has lightened the burdens and increased
the opportunities of modern life. His later discoveries have thus far been less prolific of practical
results. What difference did this make to Faraday? Not the least. At no period of his unmatched
career was he interested in utility. He was absorbed in disentangling the riddles of the universe,
at first chemical riddles, in later periods, physical riddles. As far as he cared, the question of
utility was never raised. Any suspicion of utility would have restricted his restless curiosity. In the
end, utility resulted, but it was never a criterion to which his ceaseless experimentation could be
subjected.
...