Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a great and important question. (doubly so for me, as constrained resources may see me leave the field, to which I have devoted my entire professional life, in the coming months) We are perennially grateful for the support we receive to do the work that we do. To a high degree of approximation, Einstein's predictions are very, very correct. We are trying to look very carefully at Nature because we don't think…
Some argue that keeping talented people out of industry is a downside of the sciences not an upside. Personally, particle physics irritates me because I don't believe in particles... It's all vibrations, man :)
I see it as the organizational abstraction of industry is an side-effect artifact of relative material scarcity, and a current, hopefully temporary condition in our species' evolution towards a future when advancing sciences becomes one of the major focal points of our endeavors, and the bulk of industry is largely automated away in the trail of a continuously-growing wavefront of advanced-and-advancing industry. Hopefully capitalism and industry will bootstrap us into that outcome, instead of mediocrely settling for a local maxima of extractive rentier structures. "Money is a sign of poverty", wrote Iain M. Banks, and I suspect the transition to that kind of wealth is an evolving continuum instead of an abrupt, sharp discontinuity.