nobody's saying they're idiots. But it's not like the structure of how contemporary scientific discovery gets done isn't ridden with questionable processes tha

nobody's saying they're idiots. But it's not like the structure of how contemporary scientific discovery gets done isn't ridden with questionable processes that should make you doubt that the system is aligned with producing good science. There is nothing fundamentally different about how physics gets funded (TLAs like NSF, NIH giving out grants via committee), and how physics professors get promoted (H-factors and hiring committees, playing politics at conferences, choosing strategically to work for certain PIs, the truly smart grad students and postdocs burning out and quitting). Most of my peers from high school went into high energy physics (one works at JLab, another is a professor at an east coast college; the others quit or went into... other fields, like finance). Although I am no longer a practicing biochemist, when we got together we complained about the exact same things. So yeah, I don't know about the intricacies of what happens in physics. But that doesn't mean I don't have real insight about what's going on.