I'm a big fan of Phil Anderson's article, More is Different[1] where he argues why he things this reductionist view (the view that the physics most worthy of understanding is the physics of the smallest things) is flawed. The fact of the matter is that at all sorts of scales regularities in the laws of nature emerge, and understanding the smaller and smaller building blocks is only one interesting path for physics research.
Condensed matter physics is, in my opinion, a far more interesting and varied field of study than high energy physics. Not only does it contribute to society in a way high energy physics no longer does, but in many senses it takes on a fundamental character like HEP. Every material in the long wavelength limit acts like its own little universe with its own set of fundamental particles and quantum fields.
The universes Condensed matter physics studies have supersymmetry, Majorana fermions, magnetic monopoles, dualities and any other genuinely interesting physical phenomenon you could want.
What's more is that by understanding the physics of these phenomena, we can create new technologies that really matter.
…and (if I may add) foundations of quantum mechanics (which may or may not be related to quantum gravity). And dozens of open questions in relativity alone (that have little to do with black holes).
I'm sorry, but I disagree with the label "fundamental" here.
One can observe anti-de Sitter spaces in superfluid systems. Is that not more "fundamental" than zoology of particles and their interactions? That has, literally to do with the metric tensor of space. Seems to be a bit more fundamental to me than things interacting in that space.
Put another way, the "fundamental" argument is very weak, and everyone outside of HEP knows this.
we haven’t really understood quantum theory yet on a theoretical level.
Everybody seems to agree with that, yet it seems most Physicists immediately refuse to spend any further thought on it and go back to modeling what happens if you double the number of particles and then crash them at 100 TeV
Condensed matter physics is, in my opinion, a far more interesting and varied field of study than high energy physics. Not only does it contribute to society in a way high energy physics no longer does, but in many senses it takes on a fundamental character like HEP. Every material in the long wavelength limit acts like its own little universe with its own set of fundamental particles and quantum fields.
The universes Condensed matter physics studies have supersymmetry, Majorana fermions, magnetic monopoles, dualities and any other genuinely interesting physical phenomenon you could want.
What's more is that by understanding the physics of these phenomena, we can create new technologies that really matter.
[1] https://www.tkm.kit.edu/downloads/TKM1_2011_more_is_differen...