Certainly physics is serious work (though if your physics degree was more serious in the mathematical sense than your math degree, that's a failing on the part of your university's math department).
I think I slipped through the cracks, honestly, but nevertheless that was the case. I only really had one serious math class, a two-semester PDE course; otherwise everything was pretty easy, even the mandatory (one-semester) analysis course. Of course I wasn't doing proofs in the physics classes (that was strictly a graduate thing), but the overall difficulty and complexity of the problems was rather higher.
But every physicist I've ever known has used Leibnitz notation for their serious work. Newton dot notation is used for quickly writing things out; actually working through things is typically done in the notation that allows you to indicate which variable you're differentiation or integrating with respect to; this is particularly critical in physics, because most real physical problems involve 3-4 dimensions. It's all well and good to write out the Heat Equation as \dot{y} = \alpha \nabla^2 y for brevity, but you can't even begin to actually approach it in that form - and no physicist I know would try to.
I don't know, what are you defining as "serious work"? What is "serious work" here?
In any case, the dot, as I have seen it used in physics, is always and invariably used to refer to differentiation with respect to time, which means it's actually pretty clear what variable is being manipulated when it's in use.
"Of all time". Yes, no other controversy has ever inspired as much viciousness or fame as that of notation between 2 17th century mathematicians.
Maybe you should try reading what I wrote? I didn't say it was the most vicious controversy of all time flat out, I said it was the most vicious
priority controversy of all time. You know, academic fight. It shouldn't be surprising that the most vicious examples of such arguments date back to the beginning of the scientific endeavor, when the social norms of the field were developing.
Anyway, my point wasn't "I don't know that people spent a lot of time bitching about it"; rather, I don't know that they spent a lot of time arguing instead of working. It seems unlikely to me that Bernoulli was spending less time working because he was spending so much time writing pamphlets about why Netwon's notation was stupid.
Any amount of time he was spending writing pamphlets was time that he
could have been using to do research. More seriously, the whole affair greatly damaged communications between the mathematicians of Britain and the rest of Europe for a time, and avoiding it altogether would probably lead to collaborations forming that were aborted IOTL. The overall effect would be, as I said, more people working on the calculus rather than arguing about it.