This may be an American thing

Not exclusively; that also happens with a sizeable fraction of the population in Italy and Ireland. It may depend on what teachers one has had -- people who were made to study sciences at school with poor teachers and struggle to understand it might be still be resenting that -- and I guess that science education in the US, Italy or Ireland is particularly awful (compared to, say, Scandinavia).

(This effect also seems to be at work -- when someone my wingman and I have just cold-approached asks what we do and we say we study physics, most of the times they seem to all but untranslatable 1, whereas if it's someone who's already seem me sing/dance/whatever and already thinks I'm cool, they usually swoon.)

Also, ISTM that plenty of laymen outside America have never heard of Feynman.

EDIT: OTOH in Italy and Ireland IME this only affects “pure” sciences; engineers and medics are usually seen as high-status.

Weird, "poofter" sounds like some kind of cushion or something.

It's true that every document I read about "Immigrate to Australia! It's the coolest place ever!" mentions something along the lines of "if you're not interested in team & spectator sports sports you're gonna be missing out on a lot of fun". I always suspected it was an euphemism for something much worse, so I sort of made a mental note to avoid the place. Am I right?

Engineers, doctors and technocrats have high status in the eyes of middle class India, but actual scientists, not very high, but definitely not low status. Mainly it is due to them being relatively high paying careers.

Among the middle class, a steady high paying job has higher status than a risky business. The business castes in India have almost their own parallel status hierarchy.

"poofter: someone who likes music more than football therefore must be beaten up."

Does that apply only to certain genres of music? In my home town, rock musicians are very popular (at least in the rock music subculture, which comprises a sizeable fraction of the teenage and twentysomething population anyway); so are deejays in the disco music subculture. Hell, even people who sing karaoke and are good at it are usually seen as cool. I'm very surprised there's a culturally western country where musicians are unpopular -- unless it only applies to classical music or something.

EDIT: the “spectator sports” bit in Ritalin's comment makes me guess you meant ‘likes listening to music more than watching football’, rather than ‘likes playing music more than playing football’ as I had interpreted it at first. I would be a little less surprised if this is right, but still somewhat surprised.