Military Has Been Researching "Anti-Gravity" For Nearly 70 Years
<i>If you do not work on an important problem, it&#x27;s unlikely you&#x27;ll do important work. It&#x27;s perfectly obvious. Great scientists have thought through, in a careful way, a number of important problems in their field, and they keep an eye on wondering how to attack them. Let me warn you, `important problem&#x27; must be phrased carefully. The three outstanding problems in physics, in a certain sense, were never worked on while I was at Bell Labs. By important I mean guaranteed a Nobel Prize and any sum of money you want to mention. We didn&#x27;t work on (1) time travel, (2) teleportation, and (3) antigravity. They are not important problems because we do not have an attack. It&#x27;s not the consequence that makes a problem important, it is that you have a reasonable attack. That is what makes a problem important. When I say that most scientists don&#x27;t work on important problems, I mean it in that sense. The average scientist, so far as I can make out, spends almost all his time working on problems which he believes will not be important and he also doesn&#x27;t believe that they will lead to important problems.</i><p>Richard Hamming, <i>You and Your Research</i><p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cs.virginia.edu&#x2F;~robins&#x2F;YouAndYourResearch.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cs.virginia.edu&#x2F;~robins&#x2F;YouAndYourResearch.html</a>