At conferences on optics and photonics and also when visiting research groups at universities or other scientific institutes, I often meet young graduate and PhD students, on the one hand, working full of energy and enthusiasm on their specific research topic, but, on the other hand, also with doubts about the sense or significance of their own work. Typical questions of these students are: "Is anybody outside the community really interested in what I am doing? Can we solve 'real' problems with our work? Or is all what we do just a sort of a scientific game"? When discussing with these students, I frequently notice that some of them have only a very rough idea, which topics in their research field are currently of significance for the related industry. To some degree I also encounter this lack of knowledge about industry-relevant topics in discussions with highly experienced researchers in basic science.
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