>>11391575Nah we can all agree that all scientists discover novel things in different parts of the physical world: biologist, chemist, medical scientists, etc you dont want to go back to the time when there was only physicists doing the discovering. Anyway I don't think it has to do with public fame, physicists are more popular among the lay audience simply because of the media.
In fact discovering something novel about our world is a fruit hanging so low that even some mathematician in late 19th century studying functional analysis already discovered something novel about our world as several decades later some other mathematician axiomatized quantum theory and it turned out the only way to get correct physical results is to view physical measurements as Hermitian linear operators acting on vectors on Hilbert space. (The same dude also helped pushed the Copenhagen view into the orthodoxy it enjoys today with his no hidden variable theorem, which is another great discovery of physics done by a mathematician).
And let's not forget that the discovery of computing originated from Entscheidungsproblem, one of Hilbert's problems. The idea of computers was basically discovered during axiomatizing first order logic, by mathematicians. Physicists could never have discovered the P vs NP aspect of the very physical problems that they work with on daily basis.
Similarly biologists could never have discovered the computational complexity aspect of evolution either.
These ideas are all novel aspects of our world, and I would say the computers are essential in modern era.
This unreasonable success of axiomatizing physical theories is exactly what modern physicists try to emulate, as mentioned here
>>11389844 , of course some people still have psychological problem against this new trend, because it doesn't provide enough `ontology` behind formulas, they insist that physics has to come back to its classical regime in late 1800s.
