Everyone who has ever written a grant application will recognise this wording.
And then when they see the university publicity department article on the topic everyone will know that the wild claims on how it will revolutionize the future started out as a reluctant and hedged "practicality" sentence.
When a university pub office sends something out about a new theorem in pure math, the absurd "applications" claims are even funnier.
The incentive structures you hint at don’t make sense either.
In experimental thermodynamic bench experiments, those who are familiar with boiling water in a common scientific vessel such as a tea kettle, are often familiar with how a system has its own characteristic rate of cooling, depending on the energy of the heated media to dissipate into whatever heat exchange facility is available at the time, usually ambient convection.
Under careful observation it can be seen that often it is possible to impart energy from an external source at a faster rate than the same amount of energy will later require to completely dissipate afterward.
People shouldn't be discouraged whether this is obvious or not.
Experimentation such as this can require quite a bit of dedication, especially among those who are not tea drinkers, but this is the workaround that would be required to arrive at such valid conclusions without the use of equations nor those pesky optical tweezers which are such a pain in the butt.
Is it actually code for "very dangerous military applications, DARPA please pay attention to me!"
Getting research funding is just a brutally competitive game.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=more...
A sentence like that or a variation thereof is part of the 'dance' around funding.
These applications specifically because anything that looks at anything on the micro scale includes these as “possible applications”. They sound cool and exciting, and the urge for making them has been around since before Feynman’s Room At The Bottom lecture.
But my comment is mainly surrounding the farce of making a cool discovery that progresses an area of understanding, and then being asked a question that is best posed to engineers: “but what can we do with it?” Wrong field, wrong people, wrong question.
Imagine if astrophysicists were asked these questions. “So you’ve discovered a new kind of star that is made entirely of sponge? What applications do you think will come out of this research?” “Well we hope it will help with Dyson Spheres, Astrology and sea navigation”
Our “dimension” the one unique to our perception and interpretation on Earth is dominated by biology.
I don’t see an artificial system being able to sustain a supply chain long enough to defeat that. The supply chain of biology is inherit.
No tech would ever be developed or furthered without exploring possibilities. Huge swathes of process and tech is developed purely on just trying things.
HNs recent anti-science propaganda is getting pretty out of hand.