>There is this belief propagated among physicists that smaller scales somehow have more to do with reality Only among high-energy physicists. Perhaps not coinc

>There is this belief propagated among physicists that smaller scales somehow have more to do with reality Only among high-energy physicists. Perhaps not coincidentally there's also a belief among high-energy physicists that only they count as physicists. In reality, they're a small minority of physicists. The largest specialty in physics, accounting for about half of all research, is condensed matter physics. Then in no particular order you've got AMO (atomic/molecular/optical), astrophysics, geophysics, biophysics, and a bunch of other stuff sitting between or outside those categories. With the exception of just a few corners of astrophysics, none of these fields needs, or can make sure of, the stuff being done on fundamental interactions; regular old quantum mechanics plus relativity is good enough for describing everything we can actually measure.