Donald Stokes identified four research quadrants, with axes based on whether one is seeking fundamental understanding and whether one is considering use.

• Bohr’s quadrant (pure basic research) seeks fundamental understanding with no consideration of use (e.g. Bohr’s atom, general relativity and the Higgs boson)
• Pasteur’s quadrant (use-inspired basic research) seeks fundamental understanding and is driven by consideration of use (e.g. Pasteur’s germ theory and Shannon’s information theory)
• Edison’s quadrant (pure applied research) is driven by consideration of use with no quest for fundamental understanding (e.g. Edison’s filament trials, the Wright brothers’ wind tunnel and most product R&D)
• Feynman’s quadrant (FAFO, infinite gaming, serious play etc.) is not driven by consideration of use and is not concerned with fundamental understanding (e.g. Geim’s Friday night experiments)

What is increasingly interesting to me is the transitions between these quadrants. There are three traditional routes.

First, there’s the case where fundamental discovery leads to use. Quantum mechanics was worked out in the 1920s as pure physics, and two decades later it made the transistor possible.

Second, there’s the case where the realities of application and practice are pacing the frontier and our elucidation of fundamental truths is scrambling to catch up. The steam engine was running for a century before Carnot and his successors worked out the thermodynamics explaining why.

Third, there’s the case where play turns up something one of the other quadrants picks up. Feynman’s idle maths on a wobbling cafeteria plate led him back to the electron spin problems behind his Nobel.

Historically, these routes between quadrants were structurally enforced by the relationships between the forces of capital, labour and technology. Some definitions:

• Capital: distilled, discrete units of liquid, agentic potential as represented by assets and resources with mutual, agreed upon value.
• Technology: the evolving collection of natural phenomena captured within an assemblage of socio-technical systems and practices that allows a civilisation to fulfil diverse purposes.
• Labour: the purposeful and systematic conversion of energy and matter into forms of progressively higher complexity and meaning undertaken by organic agents.

Generally speaking, research moved at the speed of people. Even with Manhattan projects and fast initiatives, people were the constraint. That’s changed.

The schtick is that technology and capital are increasingly aligning to minimise the reliance on labour supply. That’s why there are big bets being made on 1) personal productivity agents and 2) autonomous meta-science and experimentation. Maximised personal productivity plus accelerated learning loops is the holy grail of the permanent overcast.

Of course, it’s not as simple as that and the world will be curiously playable to a greater extent than ever before. That’s because different paths between the quadrants will dominate and the time taken to walk those paths will be slashed to near-zero. For example:

• FAFO to Pasteur and Bohr becomes routine; exploration gets cheap enough to run wastefully, wildly, and in volume, so play reliably turns up real results
• The Bohr to Edison lag collapses into Pasteur; understanding and use emerge together instead of decades apart
• Edison to Bohr becomes a main road; we build systems that work and accelerate before we even understand them, then we retroactively science ‘em up

If we’re truly entering the Liveness machine, we’re going to have to play seriously. Which means that Feynman’s quadrant, the very one Stokes under-appreciated, will matter much more than we ever expected.