“Why do we ask billionaires about the state of physics” - interesting question.

I propose an answer: it’s not “we” asking, it’s the media.

• billionaires are famous
• the media loves to interview famous people (about anything they’ll say)
• rich people invest in technology and fund various research & development efforts, some related to physics
• eventually the media and rich people will talk physics, giving their opinions a wide platform

There also seems to be a cognitive bias involved: people often tend to think that “if a person becomes super rich, that’s an indicator of great competence”. But it’s not a reliable indicator of competence in other fields (besides becoming and staying rich).

But sadly I must discourage high level meta-discussion in this community.

• If there’s an experiment or discovery that the source introduces, and scientific methods have been used to study it - please do.
• But journalistic critique of the state of science communication - I believe there must be a better forum for it somewhere. But I will keep it here too, because I currently don’t know where that better forum might be located on Lemmy.