It surprised me that people get so emotional about certain research areas. The work on integrity constraints in the late 70s and early 80s also received scathing criticism as not being at all relevant to the practice of database systems, only to reemerge later as being of central importance. I heard recently a question that someone asked Stephen Hawking: what is the best idea in physics this year? And Hawking said that we won't know for many years. When you do an exciting piece of research, it is very hard to know whether it will be relevant to the field in the long term. This is true both for theory and for experimental work. The vast majority of theory research results will be forgotten, as will be the vast majority of experimental work. The fact that something is done experimentally does not guarantee any lasting impact.
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