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Back in the 1990s, the Digital Libraries Initiative from the National Science Project supported a small project out of Stanford University. It sounded obscure, and a lot of people thought it wasn\\u2019t exciting, and would have little real-world application. But on that team were two graduate students \\u2013 Larry Page and Sergey Brin \\u2013 the founders of Google.

The modest grant ended up paying off very well, according to Robbert Dijkgraaf, a physics professor and the director of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton. He recently wrote a companion essay to Abraham Flexner\\u2019s 1939 piece, \\u201cThe Usefulness of Useless Knowledge,\\u201d explaining why Flexner\\u2019s ideas are even more relevant today.

We talk with Dijkgraaf about why governments should fund more basic research that doesn\\u2019t necessarily have immediate results, like the project at Stanford \\u2013 and how it can actually reap huge rewards in the long run.