> My old Uni (Manchester) doubled down hard on the work of Geim and Novoselov by building a dedicated "Graphene Institute", after they got the Nobel Prize, but even 15 years after that award most people are still trying to figure out what does it all actually mean really? Not just in terms of the theory of physics, but how useful is this stuff, in real world usage?
That's the beauty of real research. There's no guarantees it'll pan out. But it's generally worth doing and spending (sometimes decades of) time exploring. Too many people have become infatuated with instant gratification. It's pervasive even in young, scientific minds. The real gratification is failing that same test 100 times until you finally land on a variation that might work. And then figuring out why it worked.
Edit: And if that success never comes, the gratification is graduating and moving on to more solvable problems, but bringing with you the scientific methods you learned along the way. Scientists might spend their whole lives working on something that won't work and that's okay. If that isn't for you, go into product dev.
That's the beauty of real research. There's no guarantees it'll pan out. But it's generally worth doing and spending (sometimes decades of) time exploring. Too many people have become infatuated with instant gratification. It's pervasive even in young, scientific minds. The real gratification is failing that same test 100 times until you finally land on a variation that might work. And then figuring out why it worked.
Edit: And if that success never comes, the gratification is graduating and moving on to more solvable problems, but bringing with you the scientific methods you learned along the way. Scientists might spend their whole lives working on something that won't work and that's okay. If that isn't for you, go into product dev.