> I feel that this also gets at a sort of toxic notion that I've noticed some high energy physicists in my own department have (not all, but you probably know the people that I'm talking about). The notion is that if you aren't working on 12 dimensional quantum theories of gravity or the holographic principle and black hole physics, then you aren't a real physicist. Somehow they think that if your work has a real world impact, then it's tainted in some way. I'm not sure how it's gotten this way, but I've actually been told as much by another grad student that my field should be moved to the engineering department because we aren't doing real physics.

I got told that by a professor when I was looking at PhD options, I ended up in the maths department physics group because it was much nicer.

It's an odd kind of self selection. People who aren't there to feel smart don't sign up for the course so high energy theoretical physics gets ever more filled with insufferable assholes.

Not to say that the whole group was, but while every other group had the one token dickhead everyone avoided it seemed that the high energy theoretical group was run by them and the non-dickheads in the group were barely tolerated and mainly there to boost citations.