ELI5: On October 1st, 1957 my grandma's husband became a physicist overnight

A little rundown of past events leading to the question: My grandma's husband used to be a geographer, he mapped mountains. In the 1950s he was on a Soviet base in the Antarctic, mapping a mountain. Now fast forward to today. I asked my grandma about what he did before she met him, and she said something along the lines of:<br><br>*"His job was basically to map mountains. He wrote a book about a mountain in the Antarctic he discovered and sent it to the government. On October 1st, 1957, the Soviet government called him and said that they'll send a car to pick him up and take him to the Kremlin. There, he was given an apartment in Moscow, a higher wage and the title of 'physicist'."*<br><br>I can't make sense of it. What does mapping mountains have to do with physics? And why did it take so long for the government to realize that what he's doing is physics? Thank you.