#PhD students, don't get discouraged if your studies are too far from an immediate impact or application! You don't have to do the science that everyone is doing today. Instead, your today's research can become the CRUCIAL contribution to the science in the far future. ▫️ Here are some example: 1️⃣ In 1970s, Saul Teukolsky was a PhD student at Caltech and worked an entirely hypothetical problem that had no connection with reality - perturbation of black holes. In 2016, scientists reported gravitational waves from merging black holes. After that, his old PhD work became quite popular because black holes finally became experimentally measurable objects. 2️⃣ In 1958, Hummers published a method to prepare graphite oxide. No one seems to have been noticing it until a Nobel prize was awarded for graphene in 2010. Now, this is cited >25,000 times. ▫️ In #science, it’s pretty rare for your work to have a real immediate impact. Impact often takes time. This is why it’s important to be driven by curiosity. Without curiosity, previous generations wouldn’t have made so much progress. Exploration of the unknown, hypothetical theories and "weird" experiments from the past largely make the science of today possible. #AcademicTwitter