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<p>Those inventions were only built–could only be developed or conceived–after physics professors did basic research in Electricity and Magnetism and Quantum Physics and the structure of matter. Do you have a GPS system? It won’t work properly unless the engineers and designers account for general relativity effects.</p>
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<p>Universities are nonprofits that focus on basic research, which is then spun out for commercial development. If the university owns the patents, then those can be licensed to private companies for development.</p>
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<p>Rhetorical question, impossible to answer, yet I know that there are things we now know about Lincoln and civil war history that weren’t known when I was in grade school.</p>