In the 1970s, John O'Sullivan went looking for exploding black holes.
Stephen Hawking had predicted that tiny primordial black holes should slowly evaporate, ending in a burst of radio energy. O'Sullivan, an Australian radio astronomer then working in the Netherlands, set out to catch one. The difficulty was that any such signal would arrive impossibly faint, buried under cosmic noise, and smeared out of shape by the gas and dust it had crossed on the way.
So he built a mathematical tool to unsmear it — fast Fourier-transform processing sharp enough to pull one specific shape out of what looked like static.
He never found a black hole. Nobody has, to this day.
Then, in the early 1990s at Australia's CSIRO, O'Sullivan and colleagues Graham Daniels, John Deane, Diet Ostry and Terry Percival ran into a different problem. Indoors, a radio signal bounces off walls, furniture and appliances, so it arrives at the receiver several times over, at several slightly different moments. Engineers call it multipath, and it was the thing making early wireless networks slow and unreliable.
Same shape of problem. Same maths.
Their fix — multicarrier modulation combined with error correction and interleaving — was granted a US patent in 1996 and became a core part of the 802.11a and 802.11g standards.
For comparison:
- Exploding black holes detected to date: zero
- CSIRO scientists named on the patent: five
- Royalties and settlements collected by 2012: over $430 million
- Companies that settled in 2009 alone: 14, including Intel, Dell, Microsoft and Nintendo
One thing worth keeping straight: CSIRO did not invent Wi-Fi, and the agency's own lawyer told a jury as much. The first 802.11 standard came from elsewhere, and the patent was contested hard enough that a US appeals court once questioned its validity. What the team did invent was the technique that made indoor wireless fast enough to be worth using.
The next time someone asks what curiosity-driven research is actually for, mention that the thing carrying this sentence to your screen was built to listen for something that has never once been found.