I wanted to be an astrophysicist when I was 7. I kept borrowing and re-borrowing a book on stellar evolution from the public library in my hometown of Brockport, N.Y. I still remember the black-and-white picture spanning the book's front and back covers: a luminescent spiral galaxy. Beautiful.

Of course, I didn't understand it all: I wondered how they got cameras out there to photograph the Milky Way. My friend Chris was even more confused: When I told him about "white holes," he laughed hysterically at what he thought was a dirty joke.

I was haunted by Carl Sagan's exploration of the cosmos, by Vangelis' mystical music. I remember reading the science fiction novels of Isaac Asimov and seeing, albeit only with my mind's eye, suns too far to see from Earth, "stars like dust."

One of my favorite places to go was the Strasenburgh Planetarium in nearby Rochester. I was amazed, breathless with anticipation, whenever the lights dimmed and the stars arose: the story of the big bang, of quasars and exploded suns and bending light.

All of recorded history was a blink of an eye in the lifetime of the universe, but that universe was unfolding before my eyes. There are no words for the sense of wonder and awe it gave me, except one: Wow.

So I am somewhat nonplussed by the recent back-and-forth between the presidential candidates concerning "earmarks," money that congressmen give to their states. Sen. John McCain for years has lambasted a $5 million-plus program designed to help estimate the size of the endangered grizzly bear population in northwest Montana by studying the DNA from their shed hair.

Supporters of McCain's rival, Barack Obama, have shot back that Cheney-in-waiting Sarah Palin asked for $3.2 million to study the "genetics of harbor seals to understand the declines in population" in Alaska. (For the record, she's against testing lipstick on pigs.) McCain's riposte was that Obama should lay off of Palin, since the Democrat supports "planetariums and other foolishness," referring to the fact that Obama had Congress give $3 million to the Adler Planetarium in Chicago.

Wow.

Matt Damon, who is not a scientist but once played one on TV, recently said that he wants to know what Palin thinks about dinosaurs. I'd like to know what Obama and McCain think about science. It seems the message both campaigns are sending is: "Science is stoopid," not worth paying for.

Forget about the fact that spherical geometry was used by the ancients to navigate the seas, with the heavens as their guide, and that a Navy aviator like McCain ought to have a healthy respect for that. Forget about the fact that much of the mathematics behind modern cryptography, the science of secrets, grew in part from the work of a French duellist who simply wanted to solve equations. Forget about the fact that the discoveries that lay behind microwave ovens and penicillin came about by accident.

Not all science needs to have a purpose. The nature of humans is that, sometimes, they simply want to know. Everything else is just a bonus.

Srinivasa Ramanujan and Albert Einstein, the two scientific geniuses of the 20th century, made their earliest discoveries while working as clerks, not as professors working on taxpayer-funded projects; but why risk, in the 21st century, that some diamond might remain forever unearthed for want of a government grant?

If we land a man on Mars 40 years from now, it won't be the result of some Navy pilot in 2048 having the right stuff. It will be because some 10-year-old kid in Chicago or the Czech Republic looked up at a circular dome one day in 2018 and saw an image of God touching the hand of Adam: the stars, like dust.

Jonathan David Farley is a professor in the department of mathematics at the California Institute of Technology.