The Germans, due to their long history of massive earthquakes and destructive tsunamis, have, in their usual rational manner, shut down their nuclear power stations and instead rely on soft coal and importing power from coal powered Poland and nuclear powered France.
"Physicists are like lemons, you squeeze them dry then toss them away."
--- Carlo Rubbia
Started my Ph.D. in particle physics about the same year as the "first superstring revolution". Left the field post-PhD not due to any great foresight, but due to boredom.
With the benefit of hindsight, I was lucky to have done so. As it turned out I was on the tail end of the "Golden Age" of particle physics.
Woit is spot on. Find it remarkable that "string theory" and its various mutations still dominates the field after 4 decades of not being able to make testable predictions.
One almost feels sorry for the current generation of "the best and the brightest" theorists who have devoted most, if not all, of their careers to supersymmetry and string theory. Their predecessors built the Standard Model [SM], whereas their work has not lead to anything.
There are still open questions in the SM: neutrino mass, CP violation [a parametrization], QCD confinement [a Millennium Prize awaits], nature of the Higgs boson phase transition, why three generations, etc.
Someone one asked me, surprised, why I would leave the field that "investigates the fundament forces of nature".
