Why are "theorists" in physics useless pieces of shit? They are like completely happy with and proud of being spectators who smugly sit back and observe to give crappy unsolicited opinions. They don't just do that on everything, they also go and try to claim all the fame and credit for everything. These motherfuckers do nothing. If you aren't working with your hands, and instead you're clicking around on Mathematica with some illusions of grandeur, please kill yourself. Obviously you aren't even good enough at math to be better than the Mathematica developers. So just stop. Just quit. Go apply for your Goldman Sachs dream job and leave physics to people who can actually do things.
>>16865704Lots of people were theorists like Einstein and dirac.
>>16865705Einstein and Dirac (who were very different from one another, to be sure) were theorists, yes, but you can't compare them to what in 2025 is a typical "theoretical physicist"Einstein was for a long time considered basically mathematically illiterate and was more of an "ideas guy" to explain experimental physics without fancy equations. In fact he needed Minkowski to help him with SR and Hilbert scooped him on the math of GR.Dirac was maybe the original useless "theorist" and his contributions are really kind of mixed. He has an equation named after him, but did that really do much until Feynman came along? Dirac was kind of a weirdo desu. I think physics might have worked out better if Dirac never lived (for example, all the SUSY ideologues credit Dirac as their inspiration, and SUSY was a massive inter-generational dead end...)
>>16865711Didbt dirac find anti matter purely through math deduction or something
>>16865716I think what Dirac hypothesized was that the muon was the anti-electron, and he needed to backtrack massively and admit his own massive failures a lot, in public, when the actual positron was discovered
>>16865705For every one of those people there's 10000 useless ones. Maybe there should be a new rule where you have to win a nobel prize in theoretical physics before you start getting paid to do it
>>16865704Yeah, theorists don’t do anything. Nothing at all. You win the retard award, OP.
>>16865704Witten and his cronies.
>>16865779Name two theoretical physicists since 1990 who have contributed anything of meaning.Expert mode: no phenomenologists allowed. Fun fact. Theorist became so detached from reality that the useful sector of them branched off and rebranded.
>>16865792>after 1990curious how you suddenly set time boundaries. I’m a HEP guy and you’re absolutely correct that that subfield has gone to shit. But stuff like plasma and solid state are well and alive. I just can’t tell you about the current state of these subfields because they’re outside my specialization.
>>16865890I have to set time boundaries because clearly theorists were significant in the '20s and '30s. There was also Feynman in the '60s, as well as developers of QCD such as Gell-Mann. Meanwhile, I'm sure you'll agree that after the '90s it's rather obvious HEP theory is shit. Something happened in the two decades of the gray area in the '70s and '80s. Which is precisely when people like Ed Witten showed up. The next question to ask is, of all the theoretical physicists that exist, how many of them are in HEP?
>>16865789>Managed to scam <100k award>Universally despised award
>>16865705einstein lied about the aether. thanks theorists
>>16865927Yes, if you restrict yourself to HEP as I said. Ironically it’s the problem with experiment, not theory. People hoped the LHC would find supersymmetry, which would open up a whole new avenue for research. It didn’t. People hoped dark matter experiments would detect new particles. They didn’t. The only realistic avenue for tangible HEP theory research today is neutrino oscillation and guess what. Experiments like DUNE and HyperK are set back by bureaucracy and trying to jerk off enough dicks in government offices to get funding. So theorists have nothing else to do but stick fingers up their asses and publish papers on bullshit like stringy dark matter U(1) Higgs portal axions in 69 dimensional N=8 susy AdS with boundary defects. It’s an appalling state of affairs.Other areas of physics research aren’t nearly as bad. AMO doesn’t need giant collaborations that are 99% engineers and bureaucrats. Solid state comes in second. Plasma is hard enough that theory research is well and alive with the added benefit of milking DoE retards for grants by mentioning muh fusion.
