Physics: No longer a vocation?

The physicists of a bygone golden age could just as easily have been artists. Physics wasn’t yet a profession; doing it in one’s spare time, as Albert Einstein did in his years at the patent office, was acceptable in much the same way as it is today for a scientist to also be a novelist. That, of course, meant that only those who felt the call of a vocation would voluntarily submit to its rigors and relish the long hours of abstract thought and argument for no reward but the gratification of a deep soul urge. Money came from more mundane pursuits, and promotions or awards were not expected for what was, after all, pleasure rather than work. A fellowship of such physicists-by-vocation was almost Masonic, one imagines, in its intellectual honor and exclusivity. One envisions that the fiercely proud inhabitants of its rarefied firmament would have fought to establish...