1) The heroic age of physics, so to speak, culminates in the atom bomb, which for obvious reasons is vivid 2) Maybe the characters in physics are just more interesting people? E.g. Einstein, Feynman, Schrodinger, are very charismatic/aphoristic in a way Turing or Shannon weren't?

3) However weird physics is, you can always kinda describe it with familiar ideas like particles and waves, whereas computing is fundamentally about logical formalism, which puts people to sleep.

Not sure I honestly buy any of these, though my guess is 1 is the most likely? I suppose another possibility is just that the right poet hasn't arisen to tell that story.

There's a book I've wanted to write for years, and maybe eventually will, tracing the history of computing as properly something like a quest to mechanize thought. You can see it in writing by Leibniz, Boole, Pascal, Von Neumann, etc. Not just fussing with machines/logic, but thinking about thought.

I think there's this belief that computers are a machine that does what humans are bad at, but the idea of recreating human thought has been baked in from the beginning and reiterated throughout. From Leibniz's calculus ratiocinator to ENIAC's neuron-based architecture, to today's neural networks.

And what's amazing to me is once you read their own words, almost everyone is actually thinking about thought, as opposed to just doing math or building machines or whatever.