because no one here seems to have said it yet: I actually think experts and academics, by and large and especially in physics, are the most likely to know what they're talking about! Personalized mavericks are rarely right, and the mavericks people hold up as mavericks are usually just conventional (researchers, leaders, etc) who either are right place right time (jack welch, for example: good ceo, but what catapulted him to myth wasn't him, it was being in the spot where law was such that he had the opportunity to make the first real shadow bank before people realized the consequences) or just have charisma so they seem different.