LaTeX is of course big in math and physics because its math typesetting is unparalleled. And generally it’s just much more convenient to write a lot of math in LaTeX than a wysiwyg editor once you’re proficient. Outside hard sciences it’s probably not common.

My advisor was a physicist, and a Fellow of too many societies (IEEE, IoP, APS, etc).

He did not know LaTeX. Most of his papers probably were in LaTeX, as his students knew it. But I remember multiple papers he "authored" in Word, because that's what the student preferred.

I was in a top 10 school (in physics and engineering), and I can assert that the fraction of physics faculty who did not know TeX/LaTeX was at least a quarter, and could be as high as 50%.

All the major physics journals would accept Word submissions.

It's not at all unusual.

Chemists and material scientists that I have met largely use word documents and not LaTeX.

Same here. The researchers I know in medicine all seem to use word.

It's a red flag for a physics paper. It's a coffin for a mathematics paper.

As a physicist, it's not a red flag... It's a red klaxon blaring out an alarm.

I have only met a few physicists who don't write papers in latex. They are all 65+ and generally work with younger scientists/grad students who prepare the paper in latex for final drafts and submissions.

TeX was written in the 1970s for typesetting when there were no word processors by a computer programmer who couldn’t afford professional typesetting and couldn’t be bothered to learn assembly language so he wrote his own fictional one for his book — the same book he wrote TeX to publish.

Good joke :-)

This is already very tangential, but just for the benefit of anyone who may miss the humour and take the above comment seriously:

- re “couldn't afford professional typesetting”: Knuth was happy when Addison–Wesley approached him, specifically because he liked the high-quality typesetting of their books (like Thomas' Calculus) that he had used as a student. He was happy with the typesetting of the first editions of Vol 1 and 2, and only for the second edition, when the publishers moved from hot-metal typesetting to phototypesetting (that is, when the quality of the best achievable professional typesetting deteriorated), and he learned of the existence of digital typesetters, that he was motivated to come up with his own solution.

- re “couldn't be bothered to learn assembly language” — Knuth was approached by the publisher in the first place, because even as a student he had become a legendary compiler-writer (http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/B5000-AlgolRWaychoff.html#7) in multiple machine/assembly languages. In fact, the fictional “MIX” that he created was literally a “mix” of various then-existent machine languages (https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/18117), some binary, some decimal (https://catonmat.net/donald-knuths-first-computer / https://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/KnuthIBM650Appreciation.pdf), and MIX was introduced in the book with:

> There should be no hesitation about learning a new machine language; indeed, the author has found it not uncommon to be writing programs in a half dozen different machine languages during the same week! Everyone with more than a casual interest in computers will probably get to know several different machine languages…

>A Computer Programmer

No less than Donald Knuth in fact

When I was still in academia in two years ago, there was plenty of materials scientist, chemists and yes, experimental physicists I worked with who used Word, depending on the journal.

Sometimes you have to collaborate outside of physics!