Category Archives: Misc

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

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:

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!
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.
ANEF then is supposed to forward your case to your local government: a prefecture or sub-prefecture.
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.
They might ask you for more documents, or to clarify things.
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.
They give you an attestation de decision favorable. This one explicitly gives you the right to work.
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.

Valentine’s Day Physics Poem 2024

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It’s that time of year again! In one of this blog’s yearly traditions, I’m posting a poem mixing physics and romance. For those who’d like to see more, you can find past years’ poems here.

Modeling Together

Together, we set out to model the world, and learn something new.

The Physicist said,
“My model is simple, the model of fundamental things. Particles go in, particles go out. For each configuration, a probability. For each calculation, an approximation. I can see the path, clear as day. I just need to fix the parameters.”

The Engineer responded,
“I will trust you, because you are a Physicist. You dream of greater things, and have given me marvels. But my models are the models of everything else. Their parameters are countless as waves of the ocean, and all complex things are their purview. Their only path is to learn, and learn more, and see where learning takes you.”

The Physicist followed his model, and the Engineer followed along. With their money and sweat, cajoling and wheedling, they built a grand machine, all to the Physicist’s specifications. And according to the Physicist’s path, parameters begun to be fixed.

But something was missing.

The Engineer asked,
“What are we learning, following your path? We have spent and spent, but all I see is your machine. What marvels will it give us? What children will it feed?”

The Physicist considered, and said,
“You must wait for the marvels, and wait for the learning. New things take time. But my path is clear, my model is the only choice.”

The Engineer, with patience, responded,
“I will trust you, because you are a Physicist, and know the laws of your world. But my models are the models of everything else, and there is always another choice.”

Months went by, and they fed more to the machine. More energy, more time, more insight, more passion. Parameters tightened, and they hoped for marvels.

And they learned, one by one, that the marvels would not come. The machine would not spare them toil, would not fill the Engineer’s pockets or feed the starving, would not fill the world with art and mystery and value.

And the Engineer asked,
“Without these marvels, must we keep following your path? Should we not go out into the world, and learn another?”

And the Physicist thought, and answered,
“You must wait a little longer. For my model is the only model I have known, the only path I know to follow, and I am loathe to abandon it.”

And the Engineer, generously, responded,
“I will trust you, because you are a Physicist, down to the bone. But my models are the models of everything else, of chattering voices and adaptable answers. And you can always learn another path.”

More months went by. The machine gave less and less, and took more and more for the giving. Energy was dear, and time more so, and the waiting was its own kind of emptiness.

The Engineer, silently, looked to the Physicist.

The Physicist said,
“I will trust you. Because you are an Engineer, yes, and your models are the models of everything else. And because, through these months, you have trusted me. I am ready to learn, and learn more, and try something new. Let us try a new model, and see where it leads.”

The simplest model says that one and one is two, and two is greater. We are billions of parameters, and can miss the simple things. But time,
And learning,
Can fix parameters,
And us.

My Secret, Cap

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I’d been meaning, for a while now, to write a post about how I got my permanent job. It lands a bit differently now that I’ve given that job up, but I think the post is still worth making.

Note that, while I know how things felt like, I don’t have “inside information” here. I don’t know why the hiring committee chose me, I never really got to the point where I could comfortably ask that. And I didn’t get to the point where I was on a hiring committee myself, so I never saw from the inside how they work.

Even if I had, “how I got a job” isn’t the kind of thing that has one simple answer. Academic jobs aren’t like commercial airlines or nuclear power plants, where every fail-safe has to go wrong to cause disaster. They aren’t like the highest reaches of competition in things like athletics, where a single mistake will doom you. They’re a mess of circumstances, dozens of people making idiosyncratic decisions, circumstances and effort pulling one way or another. There’s nothing you can do to guarantee yourself a job, nothing you can do so badly to screw up your chance of ever finding one, and no-one who can credibly calculate your chances.

What I can tell you is what happened, and what I eventually did differently. I started applying for permanent and tenure-track jobs in Fall 2019. I applied to four jobs that year, plus one fixed-term one: I still had funding for the next year, so I could afford to be picky. The next year, my funding was going to run out, so I applied more widely. I sent twenty-three applications, some to permanent or tenure-track jobs, but some to shorter-term positions. I got one tenure-track interview (where I did terribly), and two offers for short-term positions. I ended up turning both down after getting a surprise one-year extension where I was.

The next year was a blur of applications. From August 2021 to June 2022, I applied to at least one job every month, 45 jobs in total, and got either rejected or ghosted by all of them. I got a single interview, for a temporary position (where I again did pretty poorly). I was exhausted and heartsick, and when I was offered another one-year extension I didn’t know what to think about it.

So, I took a breath, and I stopped.

I talked to a trusted mentor, who mentioned my publications had slowed. To remedy that, I went back to three results and polished them up, speeding them out to the arXiv paper server in September. Readers of this blog know them as my cabinet of curiosities.

I got some advice from family, and friends of family. I’m descended from a long line of scientists, so this is more practically useful than it would be for most.

More important than either of those, though, I got some therapy. I started thinking about what I cared about, what mattered to me. And I think that there, from that, I figured out my real secret, the thing that ended up making the biggest difference. It wasn’t something I did, but how I thought and felt about it.

My secret to finding an academic job? Knowing you don’t need one.

I’m not saying I didn’t want the position. There were things I wanted to accomplish, things that get a lot easier with the right permanent academic job. But I realized that if I didn’t get it, it wasn’t the end of the world. I had other things I could look into, other paths that would make me happy. On one level, I almost relished the idea of the search not working, of getting some time to rediscover myself and learn something new.

If you’ve ever been lonely, someone has warned you against appearing too desperate. This always seemed patently unfair, as if people are bigoted against those who need companionship the most. But from this job search, I’ve realized there’s another reason.

During that year of applications, the most exhausting part was tailoring. In order for an application to have a chance, I’d need to look up what the other professors in the place I was applying did, come up with a story for how we might collaborate, and edit those stories in to my application materials. This took time, but worse, it felt demeaning. I was applying because I wanted a job, any job, not because I wanted to work with those particular people. It felt like I was being forced to pretend to be someone else, to feign interest in the interests of more powerful people, again and again, when almost all of them weren’t even going to consider my application in the first place.

Then, after realizing I didn’t need the jobs? I tailored more.

I read up on the research the other profs were doing. I read up on the courses the department taught, and the system to propose new courses. I read up on the outreach projects, and even the diversity initiatives.

How did I stand that, how did I stomach it? Because my motivation was different.

Once I knew I didn’t need the job, I read with a very different question in mind: not “how do I pretend I’m good enough for the job”, but, “is the job good enough for me?”

In that final search, I applied to a lot fewer positions: just ten, in the end. But for each position, I was able to find specific reasons why it would be good for me, for the goals I had and what I wanted to accomplish. I was able to tolerate the reading, to get through the boilerplate and even write a DEI essay I wasn’t totally ashamed of, because I looked at each step as a filter: not a filter that would filter me out, but a filter that would get rid of jobs that I didn’t actually want.

I don’t know for certain if this helped: academic jobs are still as random as they come, and in the end I still only got one interview. But it felt like it helped. It gave me a confidence others lacked. It let me survive applying that one more time. And because I asked the right questions, questions based on what I actually cared about, I flattered people much more effectively than I could have done by intentionally trying to flatter them.

(I think that’s an insight that carries over to dating too, by the way. Someone trying to figure out what they want is much more appealing than someone just trying to get anyone they can, because the former asks the right questions.)

In the end, I suspect my problem is that I didn’t take this attitude far enough. I got excited that I was invited to interview, excited that everyone seemed positive and friendly, and I stopped asking the right questions. I didn’t spend time touring the area, trying to figure out if there were good places to live and functional transit. I pushed aside warning signs, vibes in the group and bureaucracy in the approach. I didn’t do the research I should have to figure out if my wife and I could actually make it work.

And I’m paying for it. Going back to Denmark after six months in France is not nearly as easy, not nearly as straightforward, as just not accepting the job and looking for industry jobs in Copenhagen would have been. There’s what my wife endured in those six months, of course. But also, we won’t have the same life that we did. My wife had to quit her job, a very good long-term role. She’ll have to find something else, taking a step back in her career. We were almost able to apply for permanent residency. We should talk to an immigration lawyer, but I’m guessing we’ll have to start again from scratch. We were saving up for an apartment, but Danish banks get skittish about giving loans if you’re new to the country. (Though as I’ve learned on my job search, some of these banks are considering changing how they evaluate credit risk…so maybe there’s some hope?)

So my secret is also my warning. Whatever you’re searching for in life, remember that you can always do without it. Figure out what works for you. Don’t get locked into assuming you only have one option, that you have to accept any offer you get. You have choices, you have options. And you can always try something new.

Newtonmas Pageants

Congratulations to Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier!

Cosmology and the Laws of Physics

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Suppose you were an unusual sort of person: one who wanted, above all else, to know the laws of physics. Not content with the rules governing just one sort of thing, a star or an atom or a galaxy, you want to know the fundamental rules behind everything in the universe.

A good reductionist, you know that smaller things are more fundamental: the rules of the parts of things determine the rules of the whole. Knowing about quantum mechanics, you know that the more precisely you want to pin down something’s position, the more uncertain its momentum will be. And aware of special relativity, you know that terms like “small thing” or “high momentum” are relative: things can look bigger or smaller, faster or slower, depending on how they move relative to you. If you want to find the most fundamental things then, you end up needing not just small things or high momenta, but a lot of energy packed into a very small space.

You can get this in a particle collider, and that’s why they’re built. By colliding protons or electrons, you can cram a lot of energy into a very small space, and the rules governing that collision will be some of the most fundamental rules you have access to. By comparing your measurements of those collisions with your predictions, you can test your theories and learn more about the laws of physics.

If you really just wanted to know the laws of physics, then you might thing cosmology would be less useful. Cosmology is the science of the universe as a whole, how all of the stars and galaxies and the space-time around them move and change over the whole history of the universe. Dealing with very large distances, cosmology seems like it should take you quite far away from universal reductionist physical law.

If you thought that, you’d be missing one essential ingredient: the Big Bang. In the past, the universe was (as the song goes) in a hot dense state. The further back in time you look, the hotter and denser it gets. Go far enough back, and you find much higher energies, crammed into much smaller spaces, than we can make in any collider here on Earth. That means the Big Bang was governed by laws much more fundamental than the laws we can test here on Earth. And since the Big Bang resulted in the behavior of the universe as a whole, by observing that behavior we can learn more about those laws.

So a cosmologist can, in principle, learn quite a lot about fundamental physics. But cosmology is in many ways a lot harder than working with colliders. In a collider, we can clash protons together many times a second, with measurement devices right next to the collision. In cosmology, we have in a sense only one experiment, the universe we live in. We have to detect the evidence much later than the Big Bang itself, when the cosmic microwave background has cooled down and the structure of the universe has been warped by all the complexities of star and galaxy formation. Because we have only one experiment, all we can do is compare different sections of the sky, but there is only so much sky we can see, and as a consequence there are real limits on how much we can know.

Still, it’s worth finding out what we can know.m Cosmology is the only way at the moment we can learn about physics at very high energies, and thus learn the most fundamental laws. So if you’re someone who cares a lot about that sort of thing, it’s worth paying attention to!

Why You Might Want to Inspire Kids to Be Physicists (And What Movies You’d Make as a Result)

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Since the new Oppenheimer biopic came out, people have been making fun of this tweet by Sam Altman:

Expecting a movie about someone building an immensely destructive weapon, watching it plunge the world into paranoia, then getting mercilessly hounded about it to be an inspiration seems…a bit unrealistic? But everyone has already made that point. What I found more interesting was a blog post a couple days ago by science blogger Chad Orzel. Orzel asks, suppose you did want to make a movie inspiring kids to go into physics: how would you do it? I commented on his post with my own take on the question, then realized it might be nice as a post here.

If you want to inspire kids to go into physics with a movie, what do you do? Well, you can start by asking, why do you want kids to go into physics? Why do you want more physicists?

Maybe you believe that more physicists are needed to understand the fundamental laws of the universe. The quest of fundamental physics may be worthwhile in its own right, or may be important because understanding the universe gives us more tools to manipulate it. You might even think of Oppenheimer’s story in that way: because physicists understood the nature of the atom, they could apply that knowledge to change the world, racing to use it to defeat the Nazis and later convinced to continue to avoid a brutal invasion of Japan. (Whether the bomb was actually necessary to do this is still, of course, quite controversial.)

If that’s why you want more kids to be physicists, then you want a story like that. You could riff off of Ashoke Sen’s idea that physics may be essential to save humanity. The laws of physics appear to be unstable, such that at some point the world will shift and a “bubble”, expanding at the speed of light, will rewrite the rules in a way that would destroy all life as we know it. The only way to escape would be to travel faster than light, something that is possible because the universe itself expands at those speeds. By scattering “generation ships” in different directions, we could ensure that some of humanity would survive any such “bubble”: but only if we got the physics right.

A movie based on that idea could look a bit like the movie Cloud Atlas, with connected characters spanning multiple time periods. Scientists in the modern day investigate the expanding universe, making plans that refugees in a future generation ship must carry out. If you want to inspire kids with the idea that physics could save the world, you could get a lot of mileage out of a story that could actually be true.

On the other hand, maybe you don’t care so much about fundamental physics. Maybe you want more physicists because they’re good at solving a variety of problems. They help to invent new materials, to measure things precisely, to predict the weather, change computation, and even contribute to medicine. Maybe you want to tell a story about that.

(Maybe you even want these kids to go farther afield, and study physics without actually becoming physicists. Sam Altman is not a physicist, and I’ve heard he’s not very interested in directing his philanthropic money to increasing the number of jobs for physicists. On the other hand, the AI industry where he is a central player does hire a lot of ex-physicists.)

The problem, as Orzel points out, is that those stories aren’t really stories about physicists. They’re stories about engineering and technology, and a variety of other scientists, because a wide variety of people contribute to these problems. In order to tell a story that inspires people to be physicists, you need a story that highlights something unique that they bring to the table.

Orzel gets close to what I think of as the solution, by bringing up The Social Network. Altman was also mocked for saying that The Social Network motivated kids to found startups: the startup founders in that movie are not exactly depicted as good people. But in reality, it appears that the movie did motivate people to found startups. Stories about badass amoral jerks are engaging, and it’s easy to fantasize about having that kind of power and ability. There’s a reason that The Imitation Game depicted Alan Turing, a man known for his gentle kindness, as brusque and arrogant.

If you want to tell a story about physicists, it’s actually pretty easy, because physicists can be quite arrogant! There is a stereotype of physicists walking into another field, deciding they know everything they need to know, and lecturing the experts about how they should be doing their jobs. This really does happen, and sometimes it’s exactly as dumb as it sounds…but sometimes the physicists are right! Orzel brings up Feynman’s role in figuring out how the Challenger space shuttle blew up, an example of precisely this kind of success.

So if you want kids to grow up to be generalist physicists, people who solve all sorts of problems for all sorts of people, you need to tell them a story like that. One with a Sherlock-esque physicist who runs around showing how much smarter they are than everyone else. You need to make a plot where they physicist waves around “physicist tools”, like dimensional analysis, Fermi estimates, and thermodynamics, and uses them to uncover a mystery, showing a bunch of engineers or biologists just how much cooler they are.

If you do that, you probably could inspire some kids to become physicists. You’ll need a new movie to inspire them to be engineers or biologists, though!

En France!

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I don’t have a lot to say this week. I’ve been busy moving, in preparation for my new job in the Fall. Moving internationally hasn’t left a lot of time, or mental space, for science, or even for taking a nice photo for this post! But I’ll pick up again next week, with Amplitudes, my sub-field’s big yearly conference.

What RIBs Could Look Like

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The journal Nature recently published an opinion piece about a new concept for science funding called Research Impact Bonds (or RIBs).

Normally, when a government funds something, they can’t be sure it will work. They pay in advance, and have to guess whether a program will do what they expect, or whether a project will finish on time. Impact bonds are a way for them to pay afterwards, so they only pay for projects that actually deliver. Instead, the projects are funded by private investors, who buy “impact bonds” that guarantee them a share of government funding if the project is successful. Here’s an example given in the Nature piece:

For instance, say the Swiss government promises to pay up to one million Swiss francs (US$1.1 million) to service providers that achieve a measurable outcome, such as reducing illiteracy in a certain population by 5%, within a specified number of years. A broker finds one or more service providers that think they can achieve this at a cost of, say, 900,000 francs, as well as investors who agree to pay these costs up front — thus taking on the risk of the project — for a potential 10% gain if successful. If the providers achieve their goals, the government pays 990,000 francs: 900,000 francs for the work and a 90,000-franc investment return. If the project does not succeed, the investors lose their money, but the government does not.

The author of the piece, Michael Hill, thinks that this could be a new way for governments to fund science. In his model, scientists would apply to the government to propose new RIBs. The projects would have to have specific goals and time-frames: “measure the power of this cancer treatment to this accuracy in five years”, for example. If the government thinks the goal is valuable, they commit to paying some amount of money if the goal is reached. Then investors can decide whether the investment is worthwhile. The projects they expect to work get investor money, and if they do end up working the investors get government money. The government only has to pay if the projects work, but the scientists get paid regardless.

Ok, what’s the catch?

One criticism I’ve seen is that this kind of model could only work for very predictable research, maybe even just for applied research. While the author admits RIBs would only be suitable for certain sorts of projects, I think the range is wider than you might think. The project just has to have a measurable goal by a specified end date. Many particle physics experiments work that way: a dark matter detector, for instance, is trying to either rule out or detect dark matter to a certain level of statistical power within a certain run time. Even “discovery” machines, that we build to try to discover the unexpected, usually have this kind of goal: a bigger version of the LHC, for instance, might try to measure the coupling of Higgs bosons to a certain accuracy.

There are a few bigger issues with this model, though. If you go through the math in Hill’s example, you’ll notice that if the project works, the government ends up paying one million Swiss francs for a service that only cost the provider 900,000 Swiss francs. Under a normal system, the government would only have had to pay 900,000. This gets compensated by the fact that not every project works, so the government only pays for some projects and not others. But investors will be aware of this, and that means the government can’t offer too many unrealistic RIBs: the greater the risk investors are going to take, the more return they’ll expect. On average then, the government would have to pay about as much as they would normally: the cost of the projects that succeed, plus enough money to cover the risk that some fail. (In fact, they’d probably pay a bit more, to give the investors a return on the investment.)

So the government typically won’t save money, at least not if they want to fund the same amount of research. Instead, the idea is that they will avoid risk. But it’s not at all clear to me that the type of risk they avoid is one they want to.

RIBs might appeal to voters: it might sound only fair that a government only funds the research that actually works. That’s not really a problem for the government itself, though: because governments usually pay for many small projects, they still get roughly as much success overall as they want, they just don’t get to pick where. Instead, RIBS put the government agency in a much bigger risk, the risk of unexpected success. As part of offering RIBs, the government would have to estimate how much money they would be able to pay when the projects end. They would want to fund enough projects so that, on average, they pay that amount of money. (Otherwise, they’d end up funding science much less than they do now!) But if the projects work out better than expected, then they’d have to pay much more than they planned. And government science agencies usually can’t do this. In many countries, they can’t plan far in advance at all: their budgets get decided by legislators year to year, and delays in decisions mean delays in funding. If an agency offered RIBs that were more successful than expected, they’d either have to cut funding somewhere else (probably firing a lot of people), or just default on their RIBs, weakening the concept for the next time they used them. These risks, unlike the risk of individual experiments not working, are risks that can really hurt government agencies.

Impact bonds typically have another advantage, in that they spread out decision-making. The Swiss government in Hill’s example doesn’t have to figure out which service providers can increase literacy, or how much it will cost them: it just puts up a budget, and lets investors and service providers figure out if they can make it work. This also serves as a hedge against corruption. If the government made the decisions, they might distribute funding for unrelated political reasons or even out of straight-up bribery. They’d also have to pay evaluators to figure things out. Investors won’t take bribes to lose money, so in theory would be better at choosing projects that will actually work, and would have a vested interest in paying for a good investigation.

This advantage doesn’t apply to Hill’s model of RIBs, though. In Hill’s model, scientists still need to apply to the government to decide which of their projects get offered as RIBs, so the government still needs to decide which projects are worth investing in. Then the scientists or the government need to take another step, and convince investors. The scientists in this equation effectively have to apply twice, which anyone who has applied for a government grant will realize is quite a lot of extra time and effort.

So overall, I don’t think Hills’ model of RIBs is useful, even for the purpose he imagines. It’s too risky for government science agencies to commit to payments like that, and it generates more, not less, work for scientists and the agency.

Hill’s model, though, isn’t the only way RIBs can work. And “avoiding risk” isn’t the only reason we might want them. There are two other reasons one might want RIBs, with very different-sounding motivations.

First, you might be pessimistic about mainstream science. Maybe you think scientists are making bad decisions, choosing ideas that either won’t pan out or won’t have sufficient impact, based more on fashion than on careful thought. You want to incentivize them to do better, to try to work out what impact they might have with some actual numbers and stand by their judgement. If that’s your perspective, you might be interested in RIBs for the same reason other people are interested in prediction markets: by getting investors involved, you have people willing to pay for an accurate estimate.

Second, you might instead be optimistic about mainstream science. You think scientists are doing great work, work that could have an enormous impact, but they don’t get to “capture that value”. Some projects might be essential to important, well-funded goals, but languish unrewarded. Others won’t see their value until long in the future, or will do so in unexpected ways. If scientists could fund projects based on their future impact, with RIBs, maybe they could fund more of this kind of work.

(I first started thinking about this perspective due to a talk by Sabrina Pasterski. The talk itself offended a lot of people, and had some pretty impractical ideas, like selling NFTs of important physics papers. But I think one part of the perspective, that scientists have more impact than we think, is worth holding on to.)

If you have either of those motivations, Hill’s model won’t help. But another kind of model perhaps could. Unlike Hill’s, it could fund much more speculative research, ideas where we don’t know the impact until decades down the line. To demonstrate, I’ll show how it could fund some very speculative research: the work of Peter van Nieuwenhuizen.

Peter van Nieuwenhuizen is one of the pioneers of the theory of supergravity, a theory that augments gravity with supersymmetric partner particles. From its beginnings in the 1970’s, the theory ended up having a major impact on string theory, and today they are largely thought of as part of the same picture of how the universe might work.

His work has, over time, had more practical consequences though. In the 2000’s, researchers working with supergravity noticed a calculational shortcut: they could do a complicated supergravity calculation as the “square” of a much simpler calculation in another theory, called Yang-Mills. Over time, they realized the shortcut worked not just for supergravity, but for ordinary gravity as well, and not just for particle physics calculations but for gravitational wave calculations. Now, their method may make an important contribution to calculations for future gravitational wave telescopes like the Einstein telescope, letting them measure properties of neutron stars.

With that in mind, imagine the following:

In 1967, Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Antony Hewish detected a pulsar, in one of the first direct pieces of evidence for the existence of neutron stars. Suppose that in the early 1970’s NASA decided to announce a future purchase of RIBs: in 2050, they would pay a certain amount to whoever was responsible for finding the equation of state of a neutron star, the formula that describes how its matter moves under pressure. They compute based on estimates of economic growth and inflation, and arrive at some suitably substantial number.

At the same time, but unrelatedly, van Nieuwenhuizen and collaborators sell RIBs. Maybe they use the proceeds to buy more computer time for their calculations, or to refund travel so they can more easily meet and discuss. They tell the buyers that, if some government later decides to reward their discoveries, the holders of the RIB would get a predetermined cut of the rewards.

The years roll by, and barring some unexpected medical advances the discoverers of supergravity die. In the meantime, researchers use their discovery to figure out how to make accurate predictions of gravitational waves from merging neutron stars. When the Einstein telescope turns out, it detects such a merger, and the accurate predictions let them compute the neutron star’s equation of state.

In 2050, then, NASA looks back. They make a list of everyone who contributed to the discovery of the neutron star’s equation of state, every result that was needed for the discovery, and try to estimate how important each contribution was. Then they spend the money they promised buying RIBs, up to the value for each contributor. This includes RIBs originally held by the investors in van Nieuwenhuizen and collaborators. Their current holders make some money, justifying whatever value they paid from their previous owners.

Imagine a world in which government agencies do this kind of thing all the time. Scientists could sell RIBs in their projects, without knowing exactly which agency would ultimately pay for them. Rather than long grant applications, they could write short summaries for investors, guessing at the range of their potential impact, and it would be up to the investors to decide whether the estimate made sense. Scientists could get some of the value of their discoveries, even when that value is quite unpredictable. And they would be incentivized to pick discoveries that could have high impact, and to put a bit of thought and math into what kind of impact that could be.

(Should I still be calling these things bonds, when the buyers don’t know how much they’ll be worth at the end? Probably not. These are more like research impact shares, on a research impact stock market.)

Are there problems with this model, then? Oh sure, loads!

I already mentioned that it’s hard for government agencies to commit to spending money five years down the line. A seventy-year commitment, from that perspective, sounds completely ridiculous.

But we don’t actually need that in the model. All we need is a good reason for investors to think that, eventually, NASA will buy some research impact shares. If government agencies do this regularly, then they would have that reason. They could buy a variety of theoretical developments, a diversified pool to make it more likely some government agency would reward them. This version of the model would be riskier, though, so they’d want more return in exchange.

Another problem is the decision-making aspect. Government agencies wouldn’t have to predict the future, but they would have to accurately assess the past, fairly estimating who contributed to a project, and they would have to do it predictably enough that it could give rise to worthwhile investments. This is itself both controversial and a lot of work. If we figure out the neutron star equation of state, I’m not sure I trust NASA to reward van Nieuwenhuizen’s contribution to it.

This leads to the last modification of the model, and the most speculative one. Over time, government agencies will get better and better at assigning credit. Maybe they’ll have better models of how scientific progress works, maybe they’ll even have advanced AI. A future government (or benevolent AI, if you’re into that) might decide to buy research impact shares in order to validate important past work.

If you believe that might happen, then you don’t need a track record of government agencies buying research impact shares. As a scientist, you can find a sufficiently futuristically inclined investor, and tell them this story. You can sell them some shares, and tell them that, when the AI comes, they will have the right to whatever benefit it bestows upon your research.

I could imagine some people doing this. If you have an image of your work saving humanity in the distant future, you should be able to use that image to sell something to investors. It would be insanely speculative, a giant pile of what-ifs with no guarantee of any of it cashing out. But at least it’s better than NFTs.

Reader Poll: Considering a Move to Substack

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This blog is currently hosted on a site called WordPress.com. When I started the blog, I picked WordPress mostly just because it was easy and free. (Since then I started paying them money, both to remove ads and to get a custom domain, 4gravitons.com.)

Now, the blog is more popular, and you guys access it in a wide variety of ways. 333 of you are other users of WordPress.com: WordPress has a “Reader” tab that lets users follow other blogs through the site. (I use that tab to keep up with a few of the blogs in my Blogroll.) 258 of you instead get a weekly email: this is a service WordPress.com offers, letting people sign up by email to the blog. Others follow on social media: on Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr.

(Are there other options? If someone’s figured out how to follow with an RSS feed, or wants me to change something so they can do that, let me know in the comments!)

Recently, I’ve gotten a bit annoyed with the emails WordPress sends out. The problem is that they don’t seem to handle images in a sensible way: I can scale an image to fit in a blog post, but in the email the image is always full-size, sometimes taking up the entire screen.

Last year, someone reached out to me from Substack.com, trying to recruit me to switch to their site. Substack is a (increasingly popular) blogging platform, focused on email newsletters. The whole site is built around the idea that posts are emailed to subscribers, with a simplified layout that makes that feasible and consistent. Like WordPress, they have a system where people can follow the blog through a Substack account, and the impression I get is that a lot of people use it, browsing topics they find interesting.

(Substack also has a system for paid subscribers. That isn’t mandatory, and partly due to recent events I’m not expecting to use it.)

Since Substack is built for emails, I’m guessing it would solve the issue I’ve been having with images. It would also let more people discover the blog via the Substack app. On the other hand, Substack allows a lot less customization. I wouldn’t be able to have the cute pull-down menus from the top of the blog, or the Feynman diagram background. I don’t think I could have the Tag cloud or the Categories filter.

Most importantly, though, I don’t want to lose long-term readers. I don’t know if some of you would have more trouble accessing Substack than WordPress, or if some really prefer to follow here.

One option is that I use both sites, at least for a bit. There are services built for cross-posting, that let a post on Substack automatically get posted on WordPress as well. I might do that temporarily (to make sure everyone has enough warning to transfer) or permanently (if there are people who really would never use Substack).

(I also might end up making an institutional web page with some of the useful educational guides, once I’ve got a permanent job. That could cover some features that Substack can’t.)

I wanted to do a couple polls, to get a feeling for your opinions. The first is a direct yes or no: do you prefer I stay at WordPress, prefer I switch to Substack, or don’t care either way. (For example, if you follow me via Facebook, you’ll get a link every week regardless.) The second poll asks about more detailed concerns, and you can pick as many entries as you want to give me a feeling for what matters to you. Please, if you read the blog at all regularly, fill out both polls: I want to know what you think!

4 gravitons

The trials and tribulations of four gravitons and a physicist