Our natural curiosity of how the world works leads us to study complex subjects such as particle physics and astrophysics. And while they don’t always have immediate benefits for everyday life, physics professor Marjorie Shapiro of the University of California, Berkeley says that learning more about how the world works will eventually lead to practical applications in the future, even if it’s unclear what those applications will be.

"The history has always been that when you probe things in a new way, you learn stuff that’s useful. In the 19th century, people who were doing experiments with electricity and magnetism never would have thought about transistors, and the Internet, and computers. It just would have been completely inconceivable, but they said, “I want to know how charged particles work,” and so all of us believe that sooner or later, we will find applications, if we understand the world better."

Fortunately, Shapiro’s curiosity is fed by having access to the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator.