Comment by grebc
1 day ago
Not a fair comparison because one is exposed to real life market forces vs. academic inertia.
ReactJS devs will retrain when the market dies. Professors still publishing theories/experiments costing large amounts of public monies better spent elsewhere.
There is no more inertia in the academic sector than in the software developer sector.
You have tons of software developers that cling to their preferences for ages. They have their beloved language, or beloved paradigm, and they will invent any excuse to explain how relevant it is. It is also visible with current LLM, where there are plenty of software developer islands where they blanket ban LLM usage as an emotional response. There is a big contrast with the academic sector where the most sceptical people did not blanket banned it, but find way to put guardrails (and I'm sure you can find anecdotal places that are emotionally against LLM in academia, but it is an order of magnitude lower than in the software development sector).
Same about "real life market forces". Especially when at the same time people criticize, correctly, the "publish or perish" hyper-competitiveness problem in academia. The reality is that a physicist need to retrain plenty of time, probably as much as a ReactJS dev. But that reality flies high above the head of people who jump into the first caricatural idea they have about the sector.
As for "costing large amounts of public monies", you don't seem to even know what you are talking about. String Theory probably costs society way less than plenty of other useless things, and still managed to provide very useful tools that are used in mathematical physics outside of string theory (not that I'm saying it was worth it, but it is just not fair to pretend that they did not produce anything). In contrast, the software development sector has a huge contribution on enshittification, stealing user data, making porn, creating social media addiction and creating financial bubbles that splash in the whole economy. Between the two, there is clearly one that is way more toxic on the society.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not interested in "taking side" and particularly defending physicists. I'm sure they are making mistakes and wasting money, like any other sectors, and that we still should find these places and fix them. But your depiction is so caricatural that I had to rebalance the situation by reassessing the facts.
There is no more inertia in the academic sector than in the software developer sector.
That is not true. In academia you have extremely niche research specializations and tenure as two major contributors to inertia. In general software development you have an enormous amount of career mobility.
Software developers learn new languages, new frameworks, new tools, new development methodologies all the time. A string theorist who decides to pivot away from string theory essentially has to start their career over from scratch. It’s not even close!
What are your source to say so?
Let's take for example https://arxiv.org/pdf/1901.02789
It's not even clear where String Theory is categorized in this article. Maybe High Energy Physics? Maybe Condensed Matter? It already shows how broad it is, as they already consider that people with such a different specific subject (for example theoretical dark matter in HEP or superconductivity in Condensed Matter) are not even "changing field" when they move to String Theory.
In this article, you can see on Figure 1 that about 65% of physicists (similar in HEP and CondMatter) are also working on subjects that are in one other category (so, it's not even that the person is doing String Theory and another subject inside their own group, like dark matter or superconductivity, it is more like String Theory and Astrophysics).
In Figure 2, you can see that 38% (resp. 21%) that have started their career as specialist in HEP (resp. CondMatter) ended up changing specialisation within about 5 years. (and this is "voluntary", it means that "changing specialisation" is in reality pretty easy, as of course the majority of people could change easily but just decide not to because they don't see the point of changing)
Even without this study, you can easily check the reality yourself. If I do a search on "computational tools for string theory", the first result I get is https://compstring.org/.
First, if you look at the list of participants, you will notice their CVs and how diverse they are, with background or even current activities in: SUSY, QFT, CFT, condensed matter, cosmology, quantum gravity, black hole thermodynamics, ...
Second, if you look at the software, you will see the majority are very recent (2025, 2023 and 2025). Each of them require learning the specific framework, with new rules, new ways of describing the problem and new ways of making the software do what you want. This is similar to passing from ReactJS to Angular (both are about 10 years old, so in fact, the String Theory community seems to change framework more often than devs).
You can also look up in wikipedia, the famous names in String Theory, they all have plenty of activities that go well beyond string theory (which means the reality is even stronger, as they were not even forced to do something else, they've done it because it was trivial for them to also work on these subjects): Maldacena and Susskind on black holes and wormholes, Shenker on quantum chaos, Seibert on SUSY, Strominger on gravitational waves, Fischler on blackholes production in particle colliders, Kounnas on GUTs, ...
> A string theorist who decides to pivot away from string theory essentially has to start their career over from scratch. It’s not even close!
That's just factually not true. And I've provided data that demonstrate that. It looks like you have no idea what a string theorist is doing and how they can transition to another field.
You rebalanced the situation by posting an absolute wall of garbage.
Comparing academic inertia to software development is a joke. One that is so bad it’s not worth picking apart anything you wrote.