Monthly Archives: January 2024

Why We Are Leaving France: The Misadventures of a Trailing Spouse

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In last week’s announcement, I mentioned I’d have a few follow-up posts. This week is a guest post. I want to let my wife tell her side of the story, to talk publicly about what she’s experienced over the last six months.

If you are a frequent reader of this blog, you probably know that 4gravitons relocated last year to France, following a long-coveted permanent academic position at the Institute for Theoretical Physics (IPhT) of CEA Paris-Saclay. Along with 4gravitons, I also moved to France as a trailing spouse. This is not an unusual situation, academic spouses agreeing to leave behind their friends and career to allow the academic in the relationship to develop their career. I had even set some conditions that I thought were necessary for me to successfully integrate elsewhere (access to employment, an intelligible healthcare system, good public transit), a list of desirable traits (in or near a medium-to-large city, prior knowledge of the language, walkable neighborhood),  and some places I was unwilling to move to. When the offer for a position in France arrived, we thought it was almost ideal:

  • France is an EU country, which would give me direct access to employment (by the EU directive on Freedom of Movement),
  • France is also somewhat renowned for having a sensible working healthcare system, even though in recent times it has been stretched thin,
  • IPhT is less than an hour away from Paris, and
  • Both 4gravitons and I already had a B1/B2 level in French (you can find the CEFR level descriptors here). 

However, we have decided to leave France only 6 months after arriving. What happened?

I wanted to put one of Escher’s labyrinths here, but they’re still under copyright.

The quest for a Carte de Séjour (and access to the labor market) 

As I wrote earlier, being able to work was a necessary condition for me to relocate. I work in education, which often requires a good deal of paperwork (since countries correctly want to make sure their young people are in a safe, nurturing environment). I had heard that France was facing a shortage of teachers, so I was hopeful about my prospects. I applied for one position which seemed like a perfect fit and got through a couple of interviews before the legal right to work issues started. EU law states that EU spouses have access to employment in EU countries on arrival (they should get the same rights as their European partners); however, in France employers are liable if they hire someone illegally so they are extremely cautious when hiring foreigners. In practice, this means employers will NOT hire EU spouses if they do not have a document from the French authorities explicitly stating their right to work. Since it is not possible to start the process to get such a document before arriving in France, finding work would have to wait.

One day after arriving in France, still hoping things would go smoothly and we could build a good life there, I collected all the document required by EU law to apply for a Carte de Séjour (residence card), went to the neighborhood Photomaton to have compliant photos taken, and uploaded the documents and photo-ID to the website of ANEF, the agency that handles the digital side of French immigration. EU law grants EU spouses 3 months to apply for the Carte de Séjour, but I wanted to have the process started as soon as possible so I could work. Naïvely, I thought I would be issued a document stating that I had applied for a Carte de Séjour under EU law and thus was allowed employment, the way it works in other EU countries. This was not the case. I was, instead, given a letter saying that I had applied for a Carte de Séjour, and that the document did not grant access to either employment or social benefits (such as healthcare, more on this below). To make matters worse, our sous-préfécture (the part of local government that handles the application) listed average waiting times for first demands at 161 days.

Well, at least the process was started and, in my head, the long wait times would likely only apply to complicated cases. I was arriving as an EU spouse, after having lived in another EU country (since 4gravitons had been working at the Niels Bohr Institute, in Denmark) for quite some time. It would likely be a short wait. It was just a matter of waiting for an e-mail when the process actually started and making sure to submit further documentation quickly, if it was deemed necessary.

A couple of months later, the email had not yet arrived (and work opportunities kept vanishing due to lack of papers), so we started asking for confirmation that my documents had indeed been received by our local sous-préfécture. We wrote to ANEF (“due to a technical error, we cannot answer your question”), called the sous-préfécture (“nobody here can answer your question”), support organizations (“You have the wrong visa! Can you go to another country and apply for a long-term visa from there?”), and so on. This went on for a long time despite local contacts reaching out to our sous-préfécture, our préfect, and other connections to try and accelerate the process. I finally received the e-mail starting the process (requesting some more documents, as well as some I had already sent) about 5 months after submitting the application (it took exactly 148  days, I counted). At this point, I was also granted a new letter attesting that I was legally in France (my short-term Schengen visa having expired much earlier) and that explicitly did not grant access to either employment (without a work authorization) or social benefits.

Healthcare for the undocumented

To make things even more complicated, I started having unusual symptoms a few weeks after our move to France. In the worst instance, the symptoms were worrying enough that an ambulance was sent to take me to the emergency room for an MRI (luckily, it was not serious). Note that I did not have a health card, so the ambulance had to be paid in cash before they would move me, the hospital sent a bill for the MRI by mail some weeks later, and the government sent a bill for the emergency care four months later. Luckily, we bought private insurance before moving, since we have relocated before and know that sometimes it takes a little time before one is signed up with the local healthcare institutions. Unluckily, hospitals here will not deal with insurance companies directly so we had to pay and file for reimbursement (this involves papers called feuille de soins, and the ambulance did not give us one, so no reimbursement for that). The following 3 or 4 months involved many specialist visits, lots of labs, lots of feuilles de soins… and very limited improvement on my symptoms. Since we could not have a family doctor (this requires a health card and an infinite amount of patience given that most general doctors have no space for new patients), appointments often consisted of the same questions, more referrals, confusion over a patient arriving with a giant file of previous documents, and no answers. At the end, the only answer proposed was that it may all be a physical expression of stress and anxiety.

The aforementioned situation was adding significant complications to our lives so, France being a country with socialized medicine, we started the process required to register me for a Carte Vitale (this is the name of the French health card). Residents in France aren’t automatically covered, but they are either registered for coverage by their employer or register themselves as dependents of someone with coverage. We reached out to CPAM (the French agency that controls socialized health insurance) and were given the forms to apply for coverage and a list of documents, which included a valid residency document (long-term visa or Carte de Séjour). EU spouses are not required to get a long-term visa (the French embassy explicitly told us I should get a short-term visa, and only because our residency cards for Denmark were expiring around the time of relocation) and the Carte de Séjour process was still ongoing, so we had a problem. Regardless, we made a file, and included our marriage certificate, the letter stating I had applied for a residence card, and proof of residency and work in France for 4gravitons, which shows the legality of my residence in France under EU regulations. The instructions are to send the file by mail to the corresponding CPAM office, which we tried to do but the postal office lost the letter. We eventually got an appointment to hand the documents in person and were told directly that I had the wrong visa and my request would likely be denied due to the lack of Carte de Séjour. We repeated the rules established by the EU (lack of a Carte de Séjour CANNOT be used to justify the denial of rights to EU families) and gave them the dossier. A month or so later, a letter came in the mail stating that my request had been denied because I had not been a resident for three months (at that point, I had been a resident for 2 and a half months so that was not much of an issue); a few weeks later, once my three-month visa had expired, a different letter arrived changing the reason for refusal to the lack of legal resident status.

Everyone ♥️ Paris, France

As you may well imagine, I was not feeling much appreciation for the City of Lights given our difficulties settling in and the isolation imposed by my status (legal resident but undocumented). Yet, whenever I have tried to explain why I was anxious, frustrated, or depressed, I encountered very little empathy or understanding. It often felt as if, by describing my experiences in the city, I was criticizing a core belief for people: that Paris is a magical place where one eats wonderful food and strolls about beautiful places. 

In sensing my unhappiness in (or near) Paris, I was often advised to go spend more time in the museums (the ones I am most interested in are quite expensive and permanently crowded) or walking around the nice areas of Paris (but beware not to take a wrong turn, for it is easy to find oneself in a less-than-nice place). This continued even if I explained that I have been to Paris, have seen the beautiful museums and manicured parks, and I never much enjoyed it. 

I moved here knowing that Paris was not a city I loved, but expecting it would provide access to entertainment (art, theater, gaming, etc) and to a variety of other resources (like materials for artwork or ingredients for my traditional foods). I was quite unhappy when the reliability of the RER-B became a problem: we ended up defaulting to scheduling almost two hours for any Paris trip to ensure we would arrive on time. Despite the extended time, there were occasions when we almost missed a meeting time due to train delays and cancellations. In the end, access to all the nice things in Paris was limited by logistics.

An unintegrated immigrant

Until this move, I thought that integration into developed countries was mostly a matter of individual effort: learn the language, find employment and connections to the local community, and understand that things are different than in your previous home. I can no longer hold this belief. I tried, as much as I could, to interact with our local community. I took any opportunity to speak French, and often was made to feel dumb for not finding the right terms; an ophthalmologist once welcomed me by saying “Oh, you’re the patient who does not speak French” in French (try describing different kinds of eye pain in a foreign language). I signed-up for more French lessons which seemed to focus more on local slang than on useful words (my vocabulary needs more help than my grammar for French). I also joined some art lessons and a local vocal ensemble, where I met some lovely people but had little chance of creating more in-depth connections. 

Finally, after months of trying and failing to integrate, Newtonmas came. The few friends we had here all left to visit their families. I still had no papers and could not leave France. On top of this, there was an unexpected death in my family in the lead-up to the holidays. I found myself, almost 5 months after arriving, unemployed (and with no access to the job market), uninsured (and paying for healthcare and a lot of counseling out of pocket), undocumented (at this point, with no valid visa and no way to prove I was in France legally), and grieving alone in a foreign country. We knew that I could not stay here. And thus, we cannot stay here.

Integration requires effort from the immigrant, but it also requires effort from the country. It requires a country willing to give basic access to the requirements of life, to let immigrants step into the public sphere under fair conditions, and to do so consistently and reliably. France, in its current state, cannot do this. I hope it can improve, but I am not required to wait here for it. We’ll be elsewhere, integrating into another country and contributing to their community instead.

Well That Didn’t Work

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Apologies to anyone who finds the title too flippant. This is a serious situation, and I am taking it seriously. But this is how I write. I mix the absurd and the profound. I build stories.

In May, I was offered the kind of position I’d been searching for for years, the kind of position almost everyone in my life at that point was searching for: a permanent position as a theoretical physicist. As these positions almost always do, it required an international move: I’d be leaving Denmark, and going to France.

Originally, I had planned to defer the position for a year, to have time for my wife and I to tie up loose ends. That, it turned out, wasn’t possible: the position would have to start before the end of 2023. I talked things over with my wife, and we decided to move in August. She works in education, so it would, we hoped, let her start a job with the start of the school year. We’d settle in, get to know a new country and find our place in it.

She didn’t end up finding that place. That wasn’t because she couldn’t find work: that came easy. It was because, as far as employers here understood, she wasn’t allowed to work. The EU Directive on Freedom of Movement is very clear: spouses of EU citizens (I’m German) have the right to work EU-wide, independent of whether they have any document from their host country saying so, as long as they live with their spouse. But different countries implement this differently. The Danish government makes this right clear on their website. As soon as the spouse of an EU citizen registers with Danish immigration, shortly after they arrive, they get a letter saying their case is in process, and they conditionally can work. If they happen to have been lying, their case can still be rejected, but if it is only the employee is punished: the employer couldn’t have known, after all.

France is different. If an employer hires someone who lies about their right to work, the employer is at fault, so employers are afraid to hire without explicit documentation from the French government. Government websites do not mention that spouses of EU citizens have the right to work, and leaves it off of lists where it should appear. And the French documentation is slow. My wife applied the day after we arrived, in August. Five months later, the French government finally opened the file. They gave her a document saying she had the right to remain in the country…but not yet the right to travel or work.

In the end, my wife decided that she didn’t want to stay in the country that did this to her, and seeing the effect it has had on her I have to agree.

Academics don’t get to choose where to live. People do, though, especially in places like the EU. I can choose for us to live in Denmark, to build a life in a country that has treated us well. I just have to leave academia to do it.

So that’s the plan. I have resigned from my position in France, the moving truck has picked up our stuff. We’re headed back to Denmark. I’ll spend a couple months as a visiting professor at the Niels Bohr Institute, courtesy of some extremely generous former colleagues.

After that? Something else. Probably Data Science, that seems like what most of the ex-physicists are doing these days. Ultimately, I’m up for anything I can do in Copenhagen that leverages my skills. I’ve got ten years of experience coding in weird programming languages, learning new kinds of math, and writing once a week for you guys. I’m optimistic I’ll find something. (And if you’re looking for someone like that in Copenhagen, let me know!)

I do still care about physics, even if I won’t be researching it. So I’ll keep blogging, and the blog will keep having physics content. I’ve dabbled in science journalism more recently, and I’ll keep doing more. It won’t be a full-time job for the moment, but in the long run who knows? For my physics contacts, if you’re willing to be a sounding-board for dumb questions, that would be really valuable. And if you run into a story, something that sounds like it would make good science news, then let me know!

For all those attending the conference I’m organizing: it will still go on, even if I’m less likely to be a part of it. I still have four capable co-organizers, after all.

Over the next few weeks I’ll have a few more posts about this, from different angles. I have a few more things to say, some personal, some practical (for example, a guide for EU citizens bringing non-EU spouses to France). My wife will have a guest post: she’s had some crazy things happen to her here, and deserves to have her story told.

In the meantime, I’d be happy to hear from people. I know many of you will be shocked. (Props to the old friend who figured it out from my LinkedIn posts!) I’ve met a lot of support so far, a lot of very understanding people. But whatever your reaction, I’m willing to talk through it.

Generalize

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What’s the difference between a model and an explanation?

Suppose you cared about dark matter. You observe that things out there in the universe don’t quite move the way you would expect. There is something, a consistent something, that changes the orbits of galaxies and the bending of light, the shape of the early universe and the spiderweb of super-clusters. How do you think about that “something”?

One option is to try to model the something. You want to use as few parameters as possible, so that your model isn’t just an accident, but will actually work to predict new data. You want to describe how it changes gravity, on all the scales you care about. Your model might be very simple, like the original MOND, and just describe a modification to Newtonian gravity, since you typically only need Newtonian gravity to model many of these phenomena. (Though MOND itself can’t account for all the things attributed to dark matter, so it had to be modified.) You might have something slightly more complicated, proposing some “matter” but not going into much detail about what it is, just enough for your model to work.

If you were doing engineering, a model like that is a fine thing to have. If you were building a spaceship and wanted to figure out what its destination would look like after a long journey, you’d need a model of dark matter like this, one that predicted how galaxies move and light bends, to do the job.

But a model like that isn’t an explanation. And the reason why is that explanations generalize.

In practice, you often just need Newtonian gravity to model how galaxies move. But if you want to model more dramatic things, the movement of the whole universe or the area around a black hole, then you need general relativity as well. So to generalize to those areas, you can’t just modify Newtonian gravity. You need an explanation, one that tells you not just how Newton’s equations change, but how Einstein’s equations change.

In practice, you can get by with a simple model of dark matter, one that doesn’t tell you very much, and just adds a new type of matter. But if you want to model quantum gravity, you need to know how this new matter interacts, not just at baseline with gravity, but with everything else. You need to know how the new matter is produced, whether it gets its mass from the Higgs boson or from something else, whether it falls into the same symmetry groups as the Standard Model or totally new ones, how it arises from tangled-up strings and multi-dimensional membranes. You need not just a model, but an explanation, one that tells you not just roughly what kind of particle you need, but how it changes our models of particle physics overall.

Physics, at its best, generalizes. Newton’s genius wasn’t that he modeled gravity on Earth, but that he unified it with gravity in the solar system. By realizing that gravity was universal, he proposed an explanation that led to much more progress than the models of predecessors like Kepler. Later, Einstein’s work on general relativity led to similar progress.

We can’t always generalize. Sometimes, we simply don’t know enough. But if we’re not engineering, then we don’t need a model, and generalizing should, at least in the long-run, be our guiding hope.

LHC Black Hole Reassurance: The Professional Version

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A while back I wrote a post trying to reassure you that the Large Hadron Collider cannot create a black hole that could destroy the Earth. If you’re the kind of person who is worried about this kind of thing, you’ve probably heard a variety of arguments: that it hasn’t happened yet, despite the LHC running for quite some time, that it didn’t happen before the LHC with cosmic rays of comparable energy, and that a black hole that small would quickly decay due to Hawking radiation. I thought it would be nice to give a different sort of argument, a back-of-the-envelope calculation you can try out yourself, showing that even if a black hole was produced using all of the LHC’s energy and fell directly into the center of the Earth, and even if Hawking radiation didn’t exist, it would still take longer than the lifetime of the universe to cause any detectable damage. Modeling the black hole as falling through the Earth and just slurping up everything that falls into its event horizon, it wouldn’t even double in size before the stars burn out.

That calculation was extremely simple by physics standards. As it turns out, it was too simple. A friend of mine started thinking harder about the problem, and dug up this paper from 2008: Astrophysical implications of hypothetical stable TeV-scale black holes.

Before the LHC even turned on, the experts were hard at work studying precisely this question. The paper has two authors, Steve Giddings and Michelangelo Mangano. Giddings is an expert on the problem of quantum gravity, while Mangano is an expert on LHC physics, so the two are exactly the dream team you’d ask for to answer this question. Like me, they pretend that black holes don’t decay due to Hawking radiation, and pretend that one falls to straight from the LHC to the center of the Earth, for the most pessimistic possible scenario.

Unlike me, but like my friend, they point out that the Earth is not actually a uniform sphere of matter. It’s made up of particles: quarks arranged into nucleons arranged into nuclei arranged into atoms. And a black hole that hits a nucleus will probably not just slurp up an event horizon-sized chunk of the nucleus: it will slurp up the whole nucleus.

This in turn means that the black hole starts out growing much more fast. Eventually, it slows down again: once it’s bigger than an atom, it starts gobbling up atoms a few at a time until eventually it is back to slurping up a cylinder of the Earth’s material as it passes through.

But an atom-sized black hole will grow faster than an LHC-energy-sized black hole. How much faster is estimated in the Giddings and Mangano paper, and it depends on the number of dimensions. For eight dimensions, we’re safe. For fewer, they need new arguments.

Wait a minute, you might ask, aren’t there only four dimensions? Is this some string theory nonsense?

Kind of, yes. In order for the LHC to produce black holes, gravity would need to have a much stronger effect than we expect on subatomic particles. That requires something weird, and the most plausible such weirdness people considered at the time were extra dimensions. With extra dimensions of the right size, the LHC might have produced black holes. It’s that kind of scenario that Giddings and Mangano are checking: they don’t know of a plausible way for black holes to be produced at the LHC if there are just four dimensions.

For fewer than eight dimensions, though, they have a problem: the back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests black holes could actually grow fast enough to cause real damage. Here, they fall back on the other type of argument: if this could happen, would it have happened already? They argue that, if the LHC could produce black holes in this way, then cosmic rays could produce black holes when they hit super-dense astronomical objects, such as white dwarfs and neutron stars. Those black holes would eat up the white dwarfs and neutron stars, in the same way one might be worried they could eat up the Earth. But we can observe that white dwarfs and neutron stars do in fact exist, and typically live much longer than they would if they were constantly being eaten by miniature black holes. So we can conclude that any black holes like this don’t exist, and we’re safe.

If you’ve got a smattering of physics knowledge, I encourage you to read through the paper. They consider a lot of different scenarios, much more than I can summarize in a post. I don’t know if you’ll find it reassuring, since they may not cover whatever you happen to be worried about. But it’s a lot of fun seeing how the experts handle the problem.