Practicality and the Universe

This year's Nobel Prizes in Physics have been awarded to Charles Kao, for fiber optics, and Willard Boyle and George Smith, for charge-coupled devices (CCD's, which have replaced film as the go-to way to take pictures). Very worthy selections, which are being justly celebrated in certain quarters as a triumph of practicality. Can't argue with that -- as Chad says, things like the internet (brought to you in part by fiber-optic cables) and digital cameras (often based on CCD's) affect everyone's lives in tangible ways. But they are also important for lovely impractical uses! When I hear "fiber optics" and "CCD's" in the same breath, I am immediately going to think of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), which has provided us with the most detailed map we have of our neighborhood of the universe. Almost a million galaxies, and over 100,000 quasars, baby! How impractical is that?