Monthly Archives: March 2024

Generalizing a Black Box Theory

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In physics and in machine learning, we have different ways of thinking about models.

A model in physics, like the Standard Model, is a tool to make predictions. Using statistics and a whole lot of data (from particle physics experiments), we fix the model’s free parameters (like the mass of the Higgs boson). The model then lets us predict what we’ll see next: when we turn on the Large Hadron Collider, what will the data look like? In physics, when a model works well, we think that model is true, that it describes the real way the world works. The Standard Model isn’t the ultimate truth: we expect that a better model exists that makes better predictions. But it is still true, in an in-between kind of way. There really are Higgs bosons, even if they’re a result of some more mysterious process underneath, just like there really are atoms, even if they’re made out of protons, neutrons, and electrons.

A model in machine learning, like the Large Language Model that fuels ChatGPT, is also a tool to make predictions. Using statistics and a whole lot of data (from text on the internet, or images, or databases of proteins, or games of chess…) we fix the model’s free parameters (called weights, numbers for the strengths of connections between metaphorical neurons). The model then lets us predict what we’ll see next: when a text begins “Q: How do I report a stolen card? A:”, how does it end?

So far, that sounds a lot like physics. But in machine learning, we don’t generally think these models are true, at least not in the same way. The thing producing language isn’t really a neural network like a Large Language Model. It’s the sum of many human brains, many internet users, spread over many different circumstances. Each brain might be sort of like a neural network, but they’re not like the neural networks sitting on OpenAI’s servers. A Large Language Model isn’t true in some in-between kind of way, like atoms or Higgs bosons. It just isn’t true. It’s a black box, a machine that makes predictions, and nothing more.

But here’s the rub: what do we mean by true?

I want to be a pragmatist here. I don’t want to get stuck in a philosophical rabbit-hole, arguing with metaphysicists about what “really exists”. A true theory should be one that makes good predictions, that lets each of us know, based on our actions, what we should expect to see. That’s why science leads to technology, why governments and companies pay people to do it: because the truth lets us know what will happen, and make better choices. So if Large Language Models and the Standard Model both make good predictions, why is only one of them true?

Recently, I saw Dan Elton of More is Different make the point that there is a practical reason to prefer the “true” explanations: they generalize. A Large Language Model might predict what words come next in a text. But it doesn’t predict what happens when you crack someone’s brain open and see how the neurons connect to each other, even if that person is the one who made the text. A good explanation, a true model, can be used elsewhere. The Standard Model tells you what data from the Large Hadron Collider will look like, but it also tells you what data from the muon g-2 experiment will look like. It also, in principle, tells you things far away from particle physics: what stars look like, what atoms look like, what the inside of a nuclear reactor looks like. A black box can’t do that, even if it makes great predictions.

It’s a good point. But thinking about it, I realized things are a little murkier.

You can’t generalize a Large Language Model to tell you how human neurons are connected. But you can generalize it in other ways, and people do. There’s a huge industry in trying to figure out what GPT and its relatives “know”. How much math can they do? How much do they know about geography? Can they predict the future?

These generalizations don’t work the way that they do in physics, or the rest of science, though. When we generalize the Standard Model, we aren’t taking a machine that makes particle physics predictions and trying to see what those particle physics predictions can tell us. We’re taking something “inside” the machine, the fields and particles, and generalizing that, seeing how the things around us could be made of those fields and those particles. In contrast, when people generalize GPT, they typically don’t look inside the “black box”. They use the Large Language Model to make predictions, and see what those predictions “know about”.

On the other hand, we do sometimes generalize scientific models that way too.

If you’re simulating the climate, or a baby star, or a colony of bacteria, you typically aren’t using your simulation like a prediction machine. You don’t plug in exactly what is going on in reality, then ask what happens next. Instead, you run many simulations with different conditions, and look for patterns. You see how a cloud of sulfur might cool down the Earth, or how baby stars often form in groups, leading them to grow up into systems of orbiting black holes. Your simulation is kind of like a black box, one that you try out in different ways until you uncover some explainable principle, something your simulation “knows” that you can generalize.

And isn’t nature that kind of black box, too? When we do an experiment, aren’t we just doing what the Large Language Models are doing, prompting the black box in different ways to get an idea of what it knows? Are scientists who do experiments that picky about finding out what’s “really going on”, or do they just want a model that works?

We want our models to be general, and to be usable. Building a black box can’t be the whole story, because a black box, by itself, isn’t general. But it can certainly be part of the story. Going from the black box of nature to the black box of a machine lets you run tests you couldn’t previously do, lets you investigate faster and ask stranger questions. With a simulation, you can blow up stars. With a Large Language Model, you can ask, for a million social media comments, whether the average internet user would call them positive or negative. And if you make sure to generalize, and try to make better decisions, then it won’t be just the machine learning. You’ll be learning too.

How Subfields Grow

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A commenter recently asked me about the different “tribes” in my sub-field. I’ve been working in an area called “amplitudeology”, where we try to find more efficient ways to make predictions (calculate “scattering amplitudes”) for particle physics and gravitational waves. I plan to do a longer post on the “tribes” of amplitudeology…but not this week.

This week, I’ve got a simpler goal. I want to talk about where these kinds of “tribes” come from, in general. A sub-field is a group of researchers focused on a particular idea, or a particular goal. How do those groups change over time? How do new sub-groups form? For the amplitudes fans in the audience, I’ll use amplitudeology examples to illustrate.

The first way subfields gain new tribes is by differentiation. Do a PhD or a Postdoc with someone in a subfield, and you’ll learn that subfield’s techniques. That’s valuable, but probably not enough to get you hired: if you’re just a copy of your advisor, then the field just needs your advisor: research doesn’t need to be done twice. You need to differentiate yourself, finding a variant of what your advisor does where you can excel. The most distinct such variants go on to form distinct tribes of their own. This can also happen for researchers at the same level who collaborate as Postdocs. Each has to show something new, beyond what they did as a team. In my sub-field, it’s the source of some of the bigger tribes. Lance Dixon, Zvi Bern, and David Kosower made their names working together, but when they found long-term positions they made new tribes of their own. Zvi Bern focused on supergravity, and later on gravitational waves, while Lance Dixon was a central figure in the symbology bootstrap.

(Of course, if you differentiate too far you end up in a different sub-field, or a different field altogether. Jared Kaplan was an amplitudeologist, but I wouldn’t call Anthropic an amplitudeology project, although it would help my job prospects if it was!)

The second way subfields gain new tribes is by bridges. Sometimes, a researcher in a sub-field needs to collaborate with someone outside of that sub-field. These collaborations can just be one-and-done, but sometimes they strike up a spark, and people in each sub-field start realizing they have a lot more in common than they realized. They start showing up to each other’s conferences, and eventually identifying as two tribes in a single sub-field. An example from amplitudeology is the group founded by Dirk Kreimer, with a long track record of interesting work on the boundary between math and physics. They didn’t start out interacting with the “amplitudeology” community itself, but over time they collaborated with them more and more, and now I think it’s fair to say they’re a central part of the sub-field.

A third way subfields gain new tribes is through newcomers. Sometimes, someone outside of a subfield will decide they have something to contribute. They’ll read up on the latest papers, learn the subfield’s techniques, and do something new with them: applying them to a new problem of their own interest, or applying their own methods to a problem in the subfield. Because these people bring something new, either in what they work on or how they do it, they often spin off new tribes. Many new tribes in amplitudeology have come from this process, from Edward Witten’s work on the twistor string bringing in twistor approaches to Nima Arkani-Hamed’s idiosyncratic goals and methods.

There are probably other ways subfields gain new tribes, but these are the ones I came up with. If you think of more, let me know in the comments!

An “Open-Source” Grant Proposal

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Back in the Fall, I spent most of my time writing a grant proposal.

In Europe, getting a European Research Council (ERC) grant is how you know you’ve made it as a researcher. Covering both science and the humanities, ERC grants give a lump of funding big enough to hire a research group, turning you from a lone expert into a local big-shot. The grants last five years, and are organized by “academic age”, the number of years since your PhD. ERC Starting Grants give 1.5 million euros for those with academic age 2-7. At academic age 7-12, you need to apply for the Consolidator Grant. The competition is fiercer, but if you make it through you get 2 million euros. Finally, Advanced Grants give 2.5 million to more advanced researchers.

I’m old, at least in terms of academic age. I applied to the ERC Starting Grant in 2021, but this last year I was too academically old to qualify, so I applied to the Consolidator Grant instead.

I won’t know if they invite me for an interview until June…but since I’m leaving the field, there wouldn’t be much point in going anyway. So I figured, why not share the grant application with you guys?

That’s what I’m doing in this post. I think there are good ideas in here, a few research directions that fellow amplitudeologists might want to consider. (I’ve removed details on one of them, the second work package, because some friends of mine are already working on it.)

The format could also be helpful. My wife is more than a bit of a LaTeX wiz, she coded up Gantt charts and helped with the format of the headers and the color scheme. If you want an ERC proposal that doesn’t look like the default thing you could do with LaTeX or Word, then take a look.

Finally, I suspect some laymen in the audience are just curious what a scientific grant proposal looks like. While I’ve cut a few things (and a few of these were shorter than they ought to have been to begin with), this might satisfy your curiosity.

You can find the proposal in a zip file here: https://drive.proton.me/urls/WTVN0F16HG#mYaz0edaOGha . I’ve included pdfs of the two required parts, B1 and B2, as well as the LaTeX files used to generate them.

For those of you still in the game, good luck with your ERCs!

Update from November 2024:

I wanted to include a bit more information for those who want to build off some of the ideas in the proposal.

I did end up getting offered an interview for this grant, and since the ERC doesn’t give any way to withdraw in their system I ended up going through with the interview. I didn’t get the grant, but I think it would have had a solid chance if I had had the time to focus and prepare for it (rather than mostly being busy applying for industry jobs). If anyone wants to write their own proposal building on some of the research directions I’m proposing here, I’m happy to chat and give you advice. In particular, a few things to keep in mind:

  • You need a good list of pheno applications. In particular, unless you focus your proposal heavily on the gravitational wave side, you need a good list of particle physics applications, because the particle physicists generally won’t think that the gravitational wave side “counts”. I was asked in the interview to name three particle physics measurements this would help with, I had mentioned two in the proposal and could only come up with one off the top of my head. You can do a lot better with preparation.
  • Relatedly, you need some idea of what the pipeline looks like, what these calculations eventually get used for, including the looming question of “why do this analytically rather than numerically?”
  • If you’re including the N=4 super Yang-Mills side of the story, you’ll have to overcome some skepticism. Some of that skepticism can be brushed aside by emphasizing the theory’s track record (canonical differential equations probably wouldn’t exist without research in N=4 symbols), but a meaningful source of skepticism is just whether you can work with dim reg. This is an issue currently facing a few other approaches, so it’s good to have a good answer for it!
  • If you’re relying a lot on the expertise of the people you plan on hiring (I definitely was, especially in planning to hire a mathematician) then ideally you should have some idea of who you could hire. I wasn’t in a position to do this for obvious reasons, but anyone that has a stable position should consider talking to potential hires in advance so you have a list of names.
  • Have justifications in mind for your budget. Yes, you’ll be encouraged by your home institution to just increase every budget line as far as you can get. But you will be asked about anything unusually high, so you really need a picture for what you will spend it on. Along these lines, if your institution imposes any unusual expenses (since my budget was written for the CEA, it had to pay for Mathematica and Maple licenses since the CEA is technically a private business and doesn’t have access to site licenses at academic rates) then you need to be able to justify why it’s still a good host despite that.

What Are Particles? The Gentle Introduction

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On this blog, I write about particle physics for the general public. I try to make things as simple as possible, but I do have to assume some things. In particular, I usually assume you know what particles are!

This time, I won’t do that. I know some people out there don’t know what a particle is, or what particle physicists do. If you’re a person like that, this post is for you! I’m going to give a gentle introduction to what particle physics is all about.

Let’s start with atoms.

Every object and substance around you, everything you can touch or lift or walk on, the water you drink and the air you breathe, all of these are made up of atoms. Some are simple: an iron bar is made of Iron atoms, aluminum foil is mostly Aluminum atoms. Some are made of combinations of atoms into molecules, like water’s famous H2O: each molecule has two Hydrogen atoms and one Oxygen atom. Some are made of more complicated mixtures: air is mostly pairs of Nitrogen atoms, with a healthy amount of pairs of Oxygen, some Carbon Dioxide (CO2), and many other things, while the concrete sidewalks you walk on have Calcium, Silicon, Aluminum, Iron, and Oxygen, all combined in various ways.

There is a dizzying array of different types of atoms, called chemical elements. Most occur in nature, but some are man-made, created by cutting-edge nuclear physics. They can all be organized in the periodic table of elements, which you’ve probably seen on a classroom wall.

The periodic table

The periodic table is called the periodic table because it repeats, periodically. Each element is different, but their properties resemble each other. Oxygen is a gas, Sulfur a yellow powder, Polonium an extremely radioactive metal…but just as you can find H2O, you can make H2S, and even H2Po. The elements get heavier as you go down the table, and more metal-like, but their chemical properties, the kinds of molecules you can make with them, repeat.

Around 1900, physicists started figuring out why the elements repeat. What they discovered is that each atom is made of smaller building-blocks, called sub-atomic particles. (“Sub-atomic” because they’re smaller than atoms!) Each atom has electrons on the outside, and on the inside has a nucleus made of protons and neutrons. Atoms of different elements have different numbers of protons and electrons, which explains their different properties.

Different atoms with different numbers of protons, neutrons, and electrons

Around the same time, other physicists studied electricity, magnetism, and light. These things aren’t made up of atoms, but it was discovered that they are all aspects of the same force, the electromagnetic force. And starting with Einstein, physicists figured out that this force has particles too. A beam of light is made up of another type of sub-atomic particle, called a photon.

For a little while then, it seemed that the universe was beautifully simple. All of matter was made of electrons, protons, and neutrons, while light was made of photons.

(There’s also gravity, of course. That’s more complicated, in this post I’ll leave it out.)

Soon, though, nuclear physicists started noticing stranger things. In the 1930’s, as they tried to understand the physics behind radioactivity and mapped out rays from outer space, they found particles that didn’t fit the recipe. Over the next forty years, theoretical physicists puzzled over their equations, while experimental physicists built machines to slam protons and electrons together, all trying to figure out how they work.

Finally, in the 1970’s, physicists had a theory they thought they could trust. They called this theory the Standard Model. It organized their discoveries, and gave them equations that could predict what future experiments would see.

In the Standard Model, there are two new forces, the weak nuclear force and the strong nuclear force. Just like photons for the electromagnetic force, each of these new forces has a particle. The general word for these particles is bosons, named after Satyendra Nath Bose, a collaborator of Einstein who figured out the right equations for this type of particle. The weak force has bosons called W and Z, while the strong force has bosons called gluons. A final type of boson, called the Higgs boson after a theorist who suggested it, rounds out the picture.

The Standard Model also has new types of matter particles. Neutrinos interact with the weak nuclear force, and are so light and hard to catch that they pass through nearly everything. Quarks are inside protons and neutrons: a proton contains one one down quark and two up quarks, while a neutron contains two down quarks and one up quark. The quarks explained all of the other strange particles found in nuclear physics.

Finally, the Standard Model, like the periodic table, repeats. There are three generations of particles. The first, with electrons, up quarks, down quarks, and one type of neutrino, show up in ordinary matter. The other generations are heavier, and not usually found in nature except in extreme conditions. The second generation has muons (similar to electrons), strange quarks, charm quarks, and a new type of neutrino called a muon-neutrino. The third generation has tauons, bottom quarks, top quarks, and tau-neutrinos.

(You can call these last quarks “truth quarks” and “beauty quarks” instead, if you like.)

Physicists had the equations, but the equations still had some unknowns. They didn’t know how heavy the new particles were, for example. Finding those unknowns took more experiments, over the next forty years. Finally, in 2012, the last unknown was found when a massive machine called the Large Hadron Collider was used to measure the Higgs boson.

The Standard Model

We think that these particles are all elementary particles. Unlike protons and neutrons, which are both made of up quarks and down quarks, we think that the particles of the Standard Model are not made up of anything else, that they really are elementary building-blocks of the universe.

We have the equations, and we’ve found all the unknowns, but there is still more to discover. We haven’t seen everything the Standard Model can do: to see some properties of the particles and check they match, we’d need a new machine, one even bigger than the Large Hadron Collider. We also know that the Standard Model is incomplete. There is at least one new particle, called dark matter, that can’t be any of the known particles. Mysteries involving the neutrinos imply another type of unknown particle. We’re also missing deeper things. There are patterns in the table, like the generations, that we can’t explain.

We don’t know if any one experiment will work, or if any one theory will prove true. So particle physicists keep working, trying to find new tricks and make new discoveries.

France for Non-EU Spouses of EU Citizens: To Get Your Rights, Don’t Follow the Rules

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I’m a German citizen, my wife is not. When we moved to France, we were confused. Looking at the French government’s website, we couldn’t figure out a crucial question: when, and how, would she have the right to work?

We talked to the French embassy and EU aid organizations, got advice from my employer and blogs and Facebook groups. She’s a schoolteacher, and we wanted to make sure she was able to work when we arrived, at the beginning of the school year. We did everything we were told, filled out everything we were advised to…but still, employers weren’t sure she had the right to work.

Six months and a lot of pain later, we’ve now left France. We’ve learned a lot more about EU law and French immigration practices than we ever planned to. I’m writing this guide because I haven’t found anything quite like it, something that puts all the information we found in one place. Read this guide, and you’ll learn how the law is supposed to work, how it actually works…and what you should do if, as a non-EU spouse of an EU citizen, you still want to move to France.

How it’s supposed to work

I want to be absolutely clear here: I am not a lawyer. This is not professional legal advice. This is based on what I’ve been told by Your Europe Advice, an organization that provides free advice about EU law. It’s also based on my own reading, because the relevant law here (the EU Directive on Freedom of Movement, 2004/38/EC) is surprisingly readable.

First, the crucial question. Your spouse is an EU citizen, and you have moved together to a (different!) EU country. Do you have the right to work? Let’s check the directive:

Article 23

Related rights

Irrespective of nationality, the family members of a Union citizen who have the right of residence or the right of permanent residence in a Member State shall be entitled to take up employment or self-employment there.

Yes, you have the right to work.

You may need a visa to enter the country, but if so, it is supposed to be issued quickly and free of charge according to Article 5:

2.  Family members who are not nationals of a Member State shall only be required to have an entry visa in accordance with Regulation (EC) No 539/2001 or, where appropriate, with national law. For the purposes of this Directive, possession of the valid residence card referred to in Article 10 shall exempt such family members from the visa requirement.

Member States shall grant such persons every facility to obtain the necessary visas. Such visas shall be issued free of charge as soon as possible and on the basis of an accelerated procedure.

To make sure this is done properly, the EU recommends that you make it clear that you are applying for an entry visa as a family member of an EU citizen. These are generally short-stay Schengen visas that last 90 days.

After entering, you may be required to apply for a residence card.

Article 9

Administrative formalities for family members who are not nationals of a Member State

1.  Member States shall issue a residence card to family members of a Union citizen who are not nationals of a Member State, where the planned period of residence is for more than three months.

2.  The deadline for submitting the residence card application may not be less than three months from the date of arrival.

3.  Failure to comply with the requirement to apply for a residence card may make the person concerned liable to proportionate and non-discriminatory sanctions.

This residence card must be issued within six months, and they can only ask for a very short list of documents:

Article 10

Issue of residence cards

1.  The right of residence of family members of a Union citizen who are not nationals of a Member State shall be evidenced by the issuing of a document called ‘Residence card of a family member of a Union citizen’ no later than six months from the date on which they submit the application. A certificate of application for the residence card shall be issued immediately.

2.  For the residence card to be issued, Member States shall require presentation of the following documents:

(a) a valid passport;

(b) a document attesting to the existence of a family relationship or of a registered partnership;

(c) the registration certificate or, in the absence of a registration system, any other proof of residence in the host Member State of the Union citizen whom they are accompanying or joining;

Once you get it, the residence card is supposed to be valid for five years:

Article 11

Validity of the residence card

1.  The residence card provided for by Article 10(1) shall be valid for five years from the date of issue or for the envisaged period of residence of the Union citizen, if this period is less than five years.

Six months may sound like a long time, but if everything goes according to EU law you shouldn’t be too worried, because of this:

Article 25

General provisions concerning residence documents

1.  Possession of a registration certificate as referred to in Article 8, of a document certifying permanent residence, of a certificate attesting submission of an application for a family member residence card, of a residence card or of a permanent residence card, may under no circumstances be made a precondition for the exercise of a right or the completion of an administrative formality, as entitlement to rights may be attested by any other means of proof.

“Under no circumstances”, that’s pretty strong! You do not need your residence card either to exercise your rights (such as the right to work) or to complete any administrative formality (basically, anything the government wants you to do). You also don’t need a document certifying you’ve applied for the card. You can attest your rights by any other means of proof: for example, your marriage certificate and your spouse’s passport.

In general, you have almost all of the rights that the locals do, though for a few specific things you may have to wait:

Article 24

Equal treatment

1.  Subject to such specific provisions as are expressly provided for in the Treaty and secondary law, all Union citizens residing on the basis of this Directive in the territory of the host Member State shall enjoy equal treatment with the nationals of that Member State within the scope of the Treaty. The benefit of this right shall be extended to family members who are not nationals of a Member State and who have the right of residence or permanent residence.

2.  By way of derogation from paragraph 1, the host Member State shall not be obliged to confer entitlement to social assistance during the first three months of residence or, where appropriate, the longer period provided for in Article 14(4)(b), nor shall it be obliged, prior to acquisition of the right of permanent residence, to grant maintenance aid for studies, including vocational training, consisting in student grants or student loans to persons other than workers, self-employed persons, persons who retain such status and members of their families.

All of that is pretty clear, and there are some nice guides on the EU website that walk you through a lot of it.

I suspect that no EU country perfectly implements these rules. It’s a lot easier to require a residence card for something than to allow people to show up with just their marriage certificate. But there is a lot of variation in which rights are involved, and in how quickly and reliably things are processed. So next, let’s look at how France does it.

How France says it works

If you’re trying to move to France, the most intuitive thing to do is to check the French government’s website, service-public.fr, and see what it has to say. You’ll find confirmation of some of these points: that you must apply for a residence permit within three months, that they must grant it within six months unless they have a very good reason not to.

That page takes you to the page on residence cards, which describes part of the process of applying for one. Following the pages, you can eventually find the following steps:

  1. Apply via ANEF, the Administration Numérique des Étrangers en France. You’ll have to upload several documents: a scan of your passport, something proving your residence in France (they have a list), an official photo (there are machines called Photomatons in France that do this), a scan of your spouse’s passport and your marriage certificate, and some proof that your spouse has legal residence in France (for example, their employment contract). You have to do this after entering the country. So unlike a normal visa, this can’t be started early!
  2. ANEF gives you a document called an attestation de pre-depôt. This certifies that you have submitted your application, but nothing more than that. It explicitly says it doesn’t attest to the regularity of your stay, or let you re-enter France if you leave.
  3. ANEF then is supposed to forward your case to your local government: a prefecture or sub-prefecture.
  4. The prefecture or sub-prefecture, once they open your file, will give you access to an online space where they can send and receive documents. This online space is supposed to come with an attestation de prolongation. This is a document that attests that you are legally in the country for three months while they process your case, but still does not attest that you have the right to work, register for healthcare, return to the country if you leave, or really anything else. If you go past the three months, they’re supposed to issue you another one.
  5. They might ask you for more documents, or to clarify things.
  6. Once they’ve processed your case, they give you a way (that can vary by prefecture) to set up an appointment to do biometrics. You show up with the documents they ask for and they take your fingerprints.
  7. They give you an attestation de decision favorable. This one explicitly gives you the right to work.
  8. Once your residence card is ready, they let you set up an appointment to pick it up.

Note that, despite the EU rules, it’s not until step 7 that you get a document saying you have the right to work. Instead, employers might think that you need a work authorization, a document that is complicated to apply for because it requires the employer demonstrate that there are no suitable French candidates for the position. The page on work authorizations lists a number of exceptions…but not for spouses of EU citizens, nor for the short-term Schengen visa you might have if you followed the normal rules.

Even if an employer understands the rules, they still might be worried. It might not be clear to them how to fill out the paperwork to hire you without one of the documents listed on service-public.fr. They might also be worried that the government will punish them. In France, if you claim to be a spouse of an EU citizen but turn out to be lying, your employer can be punished with very steep fines, or even in some cases jail time! So employers can be very reluctant to hire you if you don’t have some French document that explicitly says you have the right to work.

With all that, maybe you still want to try to do things this way. We still did, or at least, we couldn’t think of a better option. My wife applied with ANEF when we entered France, and we hoped things would go reasonably quickly.

How it actually works

Things do not go reasonably quickly.

The system ANEF uses to register non-EU spouses of EU nationals is quite new, and still buggy. Applications can be lost. Ours was sent to the wrong office, and not processed for some time.

The prefectures and sub-prefectures also take quite long to process things. They aim to finish in three months, but the average is typically much higher. If you check your prefecture, they may have published their average delays for recent years. Ours was around five months.

You may not have the ability to directly check on any of these things. ANEF told us they had no information, the prefecture told us they couldn’t answer our questions. We had to go through a variety of aid organizations to get any information at all.

The prefectures might ask you for documents you don’t actually need. They might want you to certify your marriage in your spouse’s home country if it was made elsewhere, or apostilled if your country does the apostille.

They might also give you a residence card that only lasts one year, instead of five, or charge you to pick it up, when they’re not supposed to.

Is it possible you get processed quickly and correctly? Yes, it’s possible. Some people do get the attestation de prolongation immediately, and not after five months. We had friends who were processed in two months, getting the card in three…after applying some political pressure behind the scenes, in a well-rated prefecture.

(Check your prefecture or sub-prefecture on Google maps, they have star ratings!)

Of the steps above, it took five months for us to get to step 4. We got up to step 6. before we gave up and left the country.

If you don’t want to do that, you need another approach.

What you should actually do

Talk to people in France, and they’ll be confused by all this. Most of them think you have to go through a very different process, one where you get a long-stay visa before entering the country, which explicitly gives the right to work.

That’s because that is actually the official process…for spouses of French people. EU Countries are allowed to have different immigration rules for their own citizens’ spouses from the general rules, and France does. Most bureaucrats you run into in France, and many employers, will assume you are supposed to get a long-stay visa, and that if you didn’t you’re doing something wrong. In particular, the bureaucrats in charge of registering you for health coverage will often assume this, so until you get your residence card you may need to pay full price for your healthcare.

Here’s the thing, though: why not get a long-stay visa?

This is a visa called type D. These visas cost money, they aren’t generally free. You can’t always get one: while the embassy is required by EU law to give you a short-stay visa, they aren’t required to give you a long-stay visa.

But long stay visas can explicitly give the right to work. They don’t expire in three months, before most prefectures will have processed your files. And they are what most French people expect you to have.

So that’s our advice. If you really want to move to France with your EU spouse, and you’re not an EU citizen yourself…then don’t go until you have a type D, long-stay, VLS-TS visa.

It’s not what you’re supposed to do. But until the system changes, it could save you five months of pain.