Then, someone won the race and all the losing physicists turned to other pursuits such as day-trading. Applying their minds to the trivial problems of moving money, stocks, bonds and derivatives around, they crashed all world markets in mere days creating the current eternal recession!
When the supersymmetry physicists move on, they possibly can get into some field that will reverse the recession!
Of note, the internet appears to have eaten away at all the potential blue laser profits, and is busily carving up cable TV
They can calculate the correct thaw time of a 100% all beef pattie by separating the heat equation in cylindrical coordinates.