The physicists don't "keep it running ". They have engineers and technicians and so on for that. They come up with models ,design experiments and analyze results of extremely complex phenomena. Almost all of them also have a PhD, they are a lot smarter than your average software team. Okay if you compare them to say people working on compilers at Google , it might be similar, but not to your average team
Consider that there is also an extreme selection bias for who studies higher physics in terms of motivation to study physics vs. desire/need for money.
Given that the income delta between a researcher at CERN and a professional software engineer at Google is >10x I'd be skeptical that this selection always translates to intelligence. Anecdotally, many PhD Physicists transfer into software for monetary reasons and do not come across as intrinsically smarter than the average engineer of equivalent experience.
