Basic Science at the Mag Lab

Scientists prepare an experiment
in the DC Field Facility.

The Magnet Lab is a basic research facility. That means scientists come here to increase humankind’s fundamental knowledge of how the world works. Our researchers tackle unanswered scientific questions (of which there are many!), not necessarily with any practical end in mind. But their findings lay the foundation for the applied research that often follows. It can take decades before basic research leads to practical applications, but as anyone driving a car or chatting on the phone (hopefully not at the same time) will tell you, it’s worth the wait.

For example, when the great physicist and chemist Michael Faraday did basic research back in the 1820s into the relationship between electricity and magnetism, he couldn’t foresee its impact. Almost all today’s electrical devices – including the generators that create our electrical power – are the applied fruits of Faraday’s discovery of electromagnetic induction. A more recent example is magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which originated in basic research that started in the 1930s.

Virtually all of the high-tech conveniences of everyday life – computers, high-speed Internet, cell phones – are the result of basic research. Remember huge cell phones? Monitors as large as the desk upon which they rested? Dial-up Internet? Without basic materials-science research, we’d still be using rotary phones and carrying around huge boom boxes instead of iPods.

In a nut shell, you could say basic research is a quest for knowledge, and applied research is a quest for solutions. Some work, however, straddles this line between basic and applied research, as is the case at the lab’s Applied Superconductivity Center. Scientists and engineers at the ASC are working on better understanding the fundamental properties of superconductors, but they are doing so with practical applications already in mind. Those applications help drive decisions about the sorts of materials they study.