The topic of what physicists, and other scientists, get paid for in practice is shrouded in more mystery than it needs to be. I think part of this is the result of scientific culture’s strange relationship to economics. More than any other profession I have encountered throughout my career, team science seems uncomfortable with the fact that its members have personal financial needs and aspirations. Perhaps we feel that such practical concerns run counter to our idealism. Clearly, some of us are comfortable with, or at least accept, a sort of scientific monasticism that is sustainable at very modest income levels. However, most scientists will eventually seek higher incomes, if only to comfortably support a family.
This article is not about salary numbers. Instead, we will explore the fundamental reasons why scientists are paid. The first thing to realize in this vein is that people pay for results. It does not matter how smart you are or how much physics you know. If you cannot produce the desired results, you will not get paid. Those desired results may not be exactly what you think they are, which can lead to career trouble. Here is a brief tour of a few scientific career categories as seen from the perspective of the people funding the work and seeking those results. Note that many jobs combine multiple elements.
Professors and Teachers – Propagation of Knowledge
This is perhaps the most obvious and familiar category. Our technological society depends on the availability of people with working knowledge of the sciences. Maintaining this stock of working knowledge requires continually imparting it to new generations and that requires transmission of scientific knowledge from living mind to living mind. Books and documentation are essential, but there would be a major discontinuity in societal capability if books were all the next generation had to learn physics from. Imagine that I handed you a textbook on electron microscopy and asked you to build a working instrument on your own without access to a teacher, mentor, or community of practitioners. At a minimum, it would take you much, much longer on your own than it would with experienced help and all its tacit knowledge to assist you. Thus, professors and teachers provide a vital service in increasing the efficiency of training new technical workers for the economy and maintaining the stock of knowledge. The result is well-trained students. The financial issue is how much society is willing to pay to maintain the stock of expertise. As the depth and breadth of scientific and technical knowledge grow, the number of scientists and students necessary to maintain the stock of knowledge in living memory grows endlessly with it. Over time, this leads to cost pressure, i.e., downward pressure on teacher and student wages, as well as pressures to “archive” less vital areas of knowledge and let them pass out of living memory, to persist only in the written record.
Basic Research – Prestige & Wonder
Before roughly the 20th century, scientists tended to either be independently wealthy or manage to find a wealthy patron, much like the artists of the time. In that arrangement, the scientist took on the character of a luxury good. The Medici, for example, essentially kept Galileo on their household payroll as an enhancement of their prestige. A similar dynamic is at work when powerful nations sponsor expensive efforts in basic science and pure research with no obvious application. While the funders may recognize the importance of exploration and knowledge for its own sake, the work is likely still seen as a luxury and at risk during fiscal contractions. Scientists paid through such largesse should keep in mind the need to (subtlety) feed their patrons’ need for prestige, as well as wonder, and invest in their communications strategy with the patron and the larger world accordingly.
Applied Research – Power & Wealth
Engineers are not enough in areas where the application of scientific knowledge has not yet been reduced to practice. In that situation, the scientist becomes a sort of industrial material valued for their expertise and skill in sufficiently codifying new or poorly understood natural law to enable the creation of first-generation technologies. This is why fields like defense, in which states perennially seek new technical advantages over their rivals, provide such a large employment opportunity for scientists. The state funds the research in the hopes of maintaining or enhancing its power. Similar dynamics are at play in the significant numbers of scientists who initiate or work at high-technology startup companies. Here, wealth is the primary result that financial backers seek. In either case, the scientists working in this capacity always have relatively small, leading-edge industrial roles and continually face the prospect of working themselves out of a job by solving the problems they study to the point that they are no longer necessary. Equally threatening are external changes in economic or government priorities that shift interest and funding away from a particular scientist’s field. When that happens, the scientist faces either a career pivot or unemployment.
Impedance Matching – Communication & Efficiency
As mentioned above, scientists are living repositories of esoteric knowledge. Those scientists who can also master the soft skills of communicating and relating to people without that knowledge may provide a great deal of value in serving as a bridge between the scientific and engineering, public policy, or business worlds. This is a role I liken to the impedance matching we learn about in electricity and magnetism class to prevent signals from bouncing back off their intended recipient. Whether consciously identified or not, people are filling this bridge function in every highly technical organization I have seen, and their service is often well rewarded. The danger for a scientist who makes their living providing this subtle function is that it may be invisible to unenlightened management, who might lay you off first and only later realize how much loss your absence has created. Thus, it is important for the impedance matcher to also communicate upward about their successes in making the organization run smoothly.
Trained Minds – Outsmarting the Competition
This is a catch-all for the ways physicists and other scientists can make their living without using their particular scientific knowledge. The physicists turned Wall Street quants belong in this category, as do the myriad science PhDs who go into fields like management consulting. Here, science plays the role of a school of mental training, like the historical Platonic Academy or Herbert’s fictional Mentats. The graduates of academic science programs are snapped up for their intelligence and mental discipline and are put to work on any number of non-scientific problems. These problems frequently involve a fair dollop of mathematics and statistics and revolve around outsmarting the economic or political competition. Success is often richly rewarded, but the scientist who goes down this path must take care to learn and abide by the rules of their new game, as those rules almost certainly diverge significantly from those of the scientific world they knew before.