And I heard about the 3 generations when I was a freshman in HS in AP physics and I wrote a sci-fi story on it. Obviously it’s a widely known problem, I assumed people would understand me.
I’m defending the public sphere, promoting thoughtful ideas and intellectual adventures. Most people still don’t know who Elon Musk is yet it seems like they would. I want the average person to know the great open questions in physics.
Other professionals, hackers and those with PhDs in mathematical physics can contribute something novel and true to the future of understanding physics. No one owns mystery or the right to explore it.
Even if it’s just an artist or mathematician inspiring a physicist to understand an idea that could lead to something unrelated but true. Or public support to increase scientific funding.
I also work with a physicist who probably would criticize my perspective here. He has analyzed and critiqued pseudoscientific claims for national security reasons. So my experience here isn’t non-existent.
And I’m not a software engineer. I was a hacker. I like to reverse engineer things and understand the world through first principles...
That's what the situation is like for actual physicists. There's people who do the actual work, there's people who are famous for claiming to have done great things, and there's very little overlap between these two sets.
(Also, there's an "imprinting" effect here. For example, in the scientific community, we talk all the time about why there are only 3 generations. It's one of many, many mysteries that everybody is always aware of. You might have heard it from Weinstein first, but people really have spent enormous effort investigating the question. And a flashy self-promoter tends to erase those people.)