Ask a theoretical physicist turned teacher, lecturer and author

[Alex K]

Do you feel sometimes that some physicists aren't really interested in saying anything enlightening or relevant but are instead exploring wank-space for their own intellectual self-gratification?

Yes, that happens. Some young people clearly went into string theory, say, because of an intellectual dick comparison. They don't really care about figuring out the universe, they care about having a badge that says: I'm smarter than you. If academia is lucky, they end up at some hedge fund or McKinsey after a while. There are some theory papers that are just enfuriatingly vague and terse such that it requires doing the research all over again to even get what they mean, and those people should be beaten with big spoons. In the public sphere, you have people like Michio Kaku who, ugh don't get me started.

But remember, and this is very important to me: physics is a huge field comprised of different experimental, applied and theoretical fields, and within theoretical physics, the majority deal with stuff such as properties of solid state objects, superconductors, crystals, statistical physics and what have you, and a minority works on fundamental stuff like particle physics, quantum fields etc. Among those theoretical physicists who deal with particle physics in the broadest sense, the majority work on calculating precision results for collider experiments and similar stuff, while the minority is busy dreaming up speculative models. Among those, many work on calculating concrete experimental predictions for their models. The remainder, the minority among the minority among a specialist subfield in one of the branches of physics, those are sadly the people the general population thinks of when they hear "physicist", because those are the guys that get popularized, that you see on TV for the most part. So when people hear "physicist", they think of some string theorist dreaming up unfalsifiable nonsense in 11 dimensions, when that is not close to what basically all physicists do.