Exactly. These fields demand all you've got. Otherwise, you'll fall behind those who are willing to sacrifice everything else for the quest, so to speak. There will always be a long-tailed distribution populated largely by smart people with personal regrets.

Experimental physics is worrisome because as education becomes less-valued by society, there will be less funding available for research in general. Costly and elaborate 'big science' projects -- the kind that have to span multiple Presidential administrations in the US -- will be among the first to be classified as "waste," and performatively killed by legislators who earn votes by emulating the feeble-minded cultists who elected them.

I think the way forward, at least in the US, is going to involve leveraging AI to build better models to reduce our dependence on experiment. This will be true of both biology (where's the next HeLa line going to come from, once Christian nationalists complete their takeover of NIH?) and physics (ditto the next RHIC or SLAC.)

Yes, this policy amounts to eating the next generation's seed corn, but that's what Americans are voting for.