Comment by PaulHoule

When it comes to physics it is even weirder than this. I’d argue there really isn’t anything at stake anymore. Einstein was able to make predictions and get them verified.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddington_experiment

But the Higgs Boson might be the last prediction in fundamental physics to be verified in the lifetime of the predictor. Neutrino oscillations sure weren’t.

Society needs people to teach introductory physics classes to a wide range of undergrad students and upper level classes to a few specialists and that is what determines the size of the job market. You don’t really need physics PhDs to do that (I did a lot of that work in the first two years of my PhD program)

The physics community manages to organize things such that a few people can work on fundamental physics on the side but their numbers are basically determined by demand for teaching with is unrelated to the situation in research.

One strange thing though is that there is some market for books for laymen like

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Brief_History_of_Time

and it’s been clear for a while those people aren’t really satisfied. They think Bell’s inequality and ‘interpretations of quantum mechanics’ are more interesting than physicists do, there is no more Babe Ruth style showmanship [1] and from an outsider’s point of view there’s a feeling that since GUTs and inflation and String theory there are just a lot of bad smells —- insiders are right to discount some of these complaints but in a lot of ways inflation and string theory have neither had a story that completely made sense nor anything that rules them out so they lumber on in an unsatisfying way so in the 2000s we started to see insider-outsider figures like Peter Woit (who I strongly endorse) and Hossenfelder (who’s been too corrupted by being a YouTube star)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babe_Ruth%27s_called_shot