I’d like to pose the notion that all exact sciences are converging towards mathematical physics. Sure, some areas of exact science will be bypassed. A botanist looking for a new species in the Amazon (a very valuable activity, by the way) does descriptive biology. But the frontier of science, the part dealing with "Why…?, definitely trancends the borders of individual fields.
This is not a spectacular notion since, eventually, everything comes down to energy (including matter and, arguably, space). The downside is that fewer and fewer people will be able to keep track of what’s happening near that frontier. A general biologist or chemist, even the average physics graduate, will be lost in advanced string theory or quantum field theories. That means that, like in Einstein’s days, only a very select, elite group of people will have the big picture.
I think of the frontier of exact science as a ripple in a pond, spreading outward. Eventually, the radius of that ripple gets so large that very few people in the world will be able to be completely aware of it all.
Can’t be helped, but I regret it nonetheless. As a personal example, I’ll tell a bit about my own history.
At the tender age of 13 I got hooked by a book I stumbled upon about the submicroscopic structure of the cell. I became a biology addict and, by the time I was a student, I was totally absorbed by molecular genetics and biochemistry. The study of DNA, RNA, proteins and the chemical processes occurring in living cells led me to a few minor answers to the fundamental questions that bothered me. It soon became clear to me, however, that biologists tended to work in a completely qualitative, descriptive way. They identify metabolic pathways, such as glycolysis, and claim to have unravelled metabolism because A got converted to B, and B to C, and so on. They sequence our DNA and the amino acid sequence of thousands of proteins. In short, they collect data. I was missing something fundamental here: How does it work? How is it regulated?
Enter biophysics. Problem is, that requires math. Which I wasn’t good at. But I still wanted to know the “how” and the “why”. So I bit the bullet and learned myself math. In doing so, I embarked on a path that basically led me to mathematical physics. I singled out thermodynamics, because that field enabled me to understand biology so much better than I used to. Eventually, even that became too narrow, because thermodynamics became increasingly more entangled with quantum mechanics. Better learn that too, then. By that time, the fundamental questions I was battling had been expanded to include cosmology. Enter relativity. And math, evermore math. Lots and lots of math. And those fields require a lot of “purely” mathematical ideas that would seem to be utterly without merit for describing the physical world. Applied math I find relatively easy, but “pure” math is hell 
. A “pure” mathematician approaches things pretty different from a physicist and I have a LOT of trouble bridging that gap.
I never got to be a scientist because I cannot function in that kind of environment, which is full of implicit hierarchy, privileges and all that, and I stepped on too many toes 
. Eventually I graduated in biology and am a licensed biology and chemistry teacher. Used to teach, loved it, but crossed over to corporate life. Still studying, though. Still want to know why the sky is blue, so to speak.
I am at a point now, at age 37, where I can get the gist of things happening at the frontier of physics. No more. I can see and understand the tip of the iceberg. And the effort required to keep up gets LARGER, not LESS. I seriously expect to lose the battle within the next 5 years or so. The radius of the spreading ripple gets so large that I will have to let go of some areas and focus on others. That will be one helluva choice for me to make, becasue I want it ALL 
.
Ironically enough, I started studying the wild flowers of my country recently, something that I couldn’t be bothered with in college. Recognizing plants, knowing when and how they flower. Simple, descriptive biology. Makes me feel happy and renewed my sense of wonder. Guess I’m getting soft .
Oh, well.
. BTW, wanting to know “what it looks like” is the precise reason why math is necessary: the quantum world cannot be envisioned, you can’t form a mental image of it. All you can do is uncover how the quantum world behaves - and math is the only tool we have for that.