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Mike,
Saying you personally don't care is something I find to be a little disheartening, but then again this is something I deal with on a daily basis during those times I'm functioning as an educator. The main thing I take objection to, though, is those who constantly ask why WE care. It's one thing to not care about the science yourself... its a whole different game when you act like others shouldn't care either.
I run into this constantly in my own research. I'm a physicist, and my specialty is in soft condensed matter. Tewa and george will blast me for the simplified term... but we like to call it "squishy physics". It's the study of materials that aren't quite solid, not quite liquid, which exhibit unusual behaviors. Almost every time I talk about my research in a setting outside of academia, people agressively question why I would "waste my time" on something so "useless" as "squishy physics". Heck, george has repeatedly insulted me for this choice... even insinuating that I must be too stupid to do the "real research" and that's why I'm being dumped off in "hickville Atlanta studying squishy poop". I constantly find myself defending my choice in research, because it's something that doesn't interest others and therefore they feel it isn't worthwhile. I see that same mentality coming from those who keep saying "get rid of this thread - it's useless". To them, it might be, but to many of us it's an important process to explore the science. I find mentalities like this to be incredibly dangerous, and sadly this concept seems to be gaining more ground. Funding of research for the sake of research is steadily declining in America. People don't seem to think knowledge for the sake of knowledge is worthwhile anymore.
I'd like to leave you with this thought... if Planck, Heisenberg, Einstein, Shrodinger, and others simply accepted the photoelectric effect, and didn't try to delve into the depths of HOW it works, we might have never figured out quantum mechanics. Without QM, we would have no desktop computers, no solid-state lasers, no genetic engineering, no MRIs... the list goes on and on. At the time, no one had any idea what technlogies would develop from their studies, but they explored them anyway, for the sake of exploration. You don't have to have the scientific mind yourself, but that "stupid experiment" that you don't care about today might just lead to something that changes the course of human history.
P.S. Unfortunately, I can't end on that dramatic effect because I can predict the silly responses people are going to type. No, I'm not suggesting the study of BHM is going to change the world, but trying to explain WHY we should see scientific exploration as a vital part of the human experience, no matter how trivial it appears today.
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