# Describing work as ‘fundamental’ is bullshit People have taken to casually describing work as ‘fundamental’ to mean that you shouldn’t expect it to be useful. However, ‘fundamental’ carries the implication that other knowledge can be built on top of the work. If the work is so incomprehensible that nobody can apply it, is it fundamental?’ Fundamental’ should be a description that a body of work needs to *earn* by actually having other work built on top of it. It’s fine to describe work as *potentially* fundamental or *hopefully* fundamental. But what often happens is that people use “this work is fundamental, not applied” as an excuse to do research and throw it over a wall, saying “you figure out how it can be applied.” According to government definitions (which unfortunately is where a lot of scientific ontology percolates from) “Fundamental Research” is just the opposite of proprietary research. That is, it’s research (whether basic or applied) that is published widely (and thus can be built upon.) This is a lot of semantics but people read into words. ### Related * [[Life Style Guide]] * [[Breakthrough fundamental science]] * [[Research has many orthogonal and non orthogonal classification axes]]