LIGO gravitational wave detector (as basic-science counterexample)

But typically, the scientists tend to say, society should fund us because we're so smart and we want to study whatever we want, because if you do basic research and just learn more about anything, somehow there're going to be spin-offs and society will benefit. That is an absolute fallacy. I just gave you the example of the transistor. Most things that have come about have actually come about because of a search for a human need. But this argument that the scientists make to Congress and the general public — we need to just study things for their own sake. So we spend a billion dollars trying to prove gravity waves from space in the LIGO project, and it's really kind of neat, they're doing some great things, and they've improved surveying as a byproduct of it. Sending someone to the moon, which actually was an engineering challenge more than a scientific challenge — you could calculate what size rocket you needed, you just had to then go out and build it, which is an engineering challenge.