BTW, the hardest people to work with are former professors. A lot of them never quite got tenure and they had to get a job in the real world. Having ruled in the fantasty world where careers are made on discerning the tenth decimal place of some obscure probability distribution, they are unsuited to work in an environment were success is guaged by kicking and pushing a product out the door.
The former chairman of the E.E. department at an Ivy League school (and a Ph.D physics graduate of one of the most prestige physics institutions in the world) came to work at my company some years ago, for a big increase in money. He was disappointed that he couldn't just take the afternoon off whenever he wanted and go skiing. He was a very bright guy, academically, but he could not get anything done, and had a way of infuriating everyone he worked with. When he got canned by our division he landed on his feet another division of our company. I later found out his father-in-law was that division's VP for R&D. He left the company within a year of his f-i-l's retirement. I'll bet a month's pay that he has always, reliably, voted Democratic.
I think it's fair to say that academia and industry tend to attract different personality types. I'm in academia myself, and if you're deadwood it's far easier to survive there than in industry. OTOH, I've known plenty of academic scientists who you could call any night of the week after midnight without worrying about waking them up - because they'd be working on their research.
I'd even go so far as to say that a lot of academic scientific research is useless if you want to get a product out the door. (I'd even say that a lot of it is useless, period.) However, what's useless now may not be useless later. Among his other sins, the mathematician G. E. Hardy said that three areas which would never have practical application would be number theory (his field), general relativity, and quantum mechanics. Were he alive today, he might say it via an encrypted e-mail message sent from an electronic computer via satellite dish.
Re your co-worker: You said he was a Physics PhD. Physics and Math seem to have the same leftist infestation as the humanities, possibly because there are more people than jobs, and the ones who get in tend to come from the same schools and culture, and form a self-sustaining clique.