One of the things I think about from time to time is the uneven representation of scientists, and physicists in particular — how often a biology/life sciences person is portrayed as representing a generic scientist, and within physics, how often particle physics is offered up as being representative of all physics. I think part of that can be gleaned from following the money. (In the US, federal funding (pdf alert, table 2) for life sciences is about half of all research spending at more than $30 billion. Physical sciences clocks in at under $6 billion) The other part comes from the sexiness of the work. Particle physics is big bucks and large collaborations, and is played up when the media latches onto “god particle” phrasing, or someone screws up a timing calibration and the shimmering spectre of superluminal neutrinos appears. Stories that can be written and appeal to people without too much of the gory detail of the actual physics appearing.

I am not alone in this thinking. Backreaction: What do “most physicists” work on?

The field I work in myself, quantum gravity, is among the over-represented fields. If you believe what you read, the quest for quantum gravity has become the “holy grail” of theoretical physicists all over the planet, and we’re all working on it because the end of science is near and there’s nothing else left to do.

Bee breaks down the numbers and finds

[This] tells you that “most physicists” don’t even do high energy physics, certainly not quantum gravity, and have no business with multiverses, firewalls, or “micro-landscapes of black holes”.