Richard Feynman:
Atypically, among all the other laws of physics, gravitation has relatively few practical applications — I mean the new knowledge of the law; it has a lot of practical applications: it keeps people in their seats, and so on. But the new knowledge of the law has few practical applications relatively speaking, compared to the other laws. … The only applications I could think of were, first, in some geophysical prospecting; in predicting the tides; nowadays, more modernly, in working out the motions of the satellites and planet probes and so on that we send up; and also, modernly, to calculate the predictions of the planets’s position[s], which have great utility for astrologers to publish their predictions and horoscopes in the magazines. That’s the strange world we live in: that all the advances in understanding are used only to continue the nonsense which has existed for two thousand years.
— “The Character of Physical Law, Part 1.” Lecture at Cornell University, 1964. Online at http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/richard-feynman-the-character-of-physical-law/ (accessed 20111203), time: 36:59–38:11.
