Tag Archives: academia

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.

Newtonmas Pageants

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Newtonmas: because if you’re going to celebrate someone supposedly born on December 25, you might as well pick someone whose actual birthday was within two weeks of that.

My past Newtonmas posts have tended to be about gifts, which is a pretty easy theme. But Christmas, for some, isn’t just about Santa Claus delivering gifts, but about someone’s birth. Children put on plays acting out different characters. In Mexico, they include little devils, who try to tempt the shepherds away from visiting Jesus.

Could we do this kind of thing for Newtonmas? A Newtonmas Pageant?

The miraculous child

Historians do know a bit about Newton’s birth. His father (also named Isaac Newton) died two months before he was born. Newton was born prematurely, his mother apparently claimed he could fit inside a quart mug.

The mug may be surprising (it comes in quarts?), but there isn’t really enough material for a proper story here. That said, it would be kind of beside the point if there were. If we’re celebrating science, maybe the story of one particular child is not the story we should be telling.

Instead, we can tell stories about scientific ideas. These often have quite dramatic stories. Instead of running from inn to inn looking for rooms, scientists run from journal to journal trying to publish. Instead of frankincense, myrrh, and gold, there are Nobel prizes. Instead of devils tempting the shepherds away, you have tempting but unproductive ideas. For example, Newton battled ideas from Descartes and Liebniz that suggested gravity could be caused by a vortex of fluid. The idea was popular because it was mechanical-sounding: no invisible force of gravity needed. But it didn’t work, and Newton spent half of the Principia where he wrote down his new science building a theory of fluids so he could say it didn’t work.

So for this Newtonmas, tell the story of a scientific idea: one that had a difficult birth but that, eventually brought pilgrims and gifts from miles around.

Merry Newtonmas, everyone!

What’s in a Subfield?

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A while back, someone asked me what my subfield, amplitudeology, is really about. I wrote an answer to that here, a short-term and long-term perspective that line up with the stories we often tell about the field. I talked about how we try to figure out ways to calculate probabilities faster, first for understanding the output of particle colliders like the LHC, then more recently for gravitational wave telescopes. I talked about how the philosophy we use for that carries us farther, how focusing on the minimal information we need to make a prediction gives us hope that we can generalize and even propose totally new theories.

The world doesn’t follow stories, though, not quite so neatly. Try to define something as simple as the word “game” and you run into trouble. Some games have a winner and a loser, some games everyone is on one team, and some games don’t have winners or losers at all. Games can involve physical exercise, computers, boards and dice, or just people telling stories. They can be played for fun, or for money, silly or deadly serious. Most have rules, but some don’t even have that. Instead, games are linked by history: a series of resemblances, people saying that “this” is a game because it’s kind of like “that”.

A subfield isn’t just a word, it’s a group of people. So subfields aren’t defined just by resemblance. Instead, they’re defined by practicality.

To ask what amplitudeology is really about, think about why you might want to call yourself an amplitudeologist. It could be a question of goals, certainly: you might care a lot about making better predictions for the LHC, or you could have some other grand story in mind about how amplitudes will save the world. Instead, though, it could be a matter of training: you learned certain methods, certain mathematics, a certain perspective, and now you apply it to your research, even if it goes further afield from what was considered “amplitudeology” before. It could even be a matter of community, joining with others who you think do cool stuff, even if you don’t share exactly the same goals or the same methods.

Calling yourself an amplitudeologist means you go to their conferences and listen to their talks, means you look to them to collaborate and pay attention to their papers. Those kinds of things define a subfield: not some grand mission statement, but practical questions of interest, what people work on and know and where they’re going with that. Instead of one story, like every other word, amplitudeology has a practical meaning that shifts and changes with time. That’s the way subfields should be: useful to the people who practice them.

What Referees Are For

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This week, we had a colloquium talk by the managing editor of the Open Journal of Astrophysics.

The Open Journal of Astrophysics is an example of an arXiv overlay journal. In the old days, journals shouldered the difficult task of compiling scientists’ work into a readable format and sending them to university libraries all over the world so people could stay up to date with the work of distant colleagues. They used to charge libraries for the journals, now some instead charge authors per paper they want to publish.

Now, most of that is unnecessary due to online resources, in my field the arXiv. We prepare our papers using free tools like LaTeX, then upload them to arXiv.org, a website that makes the papers freely accessible for everybody. I don’t think I’ve ever read a paper in a physical journal in my field, and I only check journal websites if I think there’s a mistake in the arXiv version. The rest of the time, I just use the arXiv.

Still, journals do one thing the arXiv doesn’t do, and that’s refereeing. Each paper a journal receives is sent out to a few expert referees. The referees read the paper, and either reject it, accept it as-is, or demand changes before they can accept it. The journal then publishes accepted papers only.

The goal of arXiv overlay journals is to make this feature of journals also unnecessary. To do this, they notice that if every paper is already on arXiv, they don’t need to host papers or print them or typeset them. They just need to find suitable referees, and announce which papers passed.

The Open Journal of Astrophysics is a relatively small arXiv overlay journal. They operate quite cheaply, in part because the people running it can handle most of it as a minor distraction from their day job. SciPost is much bigger, and has to spend more per paper to operate. Still, it spends a lot less than journals charge authors.

We had a spirited discussion after the talk, and someone brought up an interesting point: why do we need to announce which papers passed? Can’t we just publish everything?

What, in the end, are the referees actually for? Why do we need them?

One function of referees is to check for mistakes. This is most important in mathematics, where referees might spend years making sure every step in a proof works as intended. Other fields vary, from theoretical physics (where we can check some things sometimes, but often have to make do with spotting poorly explained parts of a calculation), to fields that do experiments in the real world (where referees can look for warning signs and shady statistics, but won’t actually reproduce the experiment). A mistake found by a referee can be a boon to not just the wider scientific community, but to the author as well. Most scientists would prefer their papers to be correct, so we’re often happy to hear about a genuine mistake.

If this was all referees were for, though, then you don’t actually need to reject any papers. As a colleague of mine suggested, you just need the referees to publish their reports. Then the papers could be published along with comments from the referees, and possibly also responses from the author. Readers could see any mistakes the referees found, and judge for themselves what they show about the result.

Referees already publish their reports in SciPost much of the time, though not currently in the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Both journals still reject some papers, though. In part, that’s because they serve another function: referees are supposed to tell us which papers are “good”.

Some journals are more prestigious and fancy than others. Nature and Science are the most famous, though people in my field almost never bother to publish in either. Still, we have a hierarchy in mind, with Physical Review Letters on the high end and JHEP on the lower one. Publishing in a fancier and more prestigious journal is supposed to say something about you as a scientist, to say that your work is fancier and more prestigious. If you can’t publish in any journal at all, then your work wasn’t interesting enough to merit getting credit for it, and maybe you should have worked harder.

What does that credit buy you? Ostensibly, everything. Jobs are more likely to hire you if you’ve published in more prestigious places, and grant agencies will be more likely to give you money.

In practice, though, this depends a lot on who’s making the decisions. Some people will weigh these kinds of things highly, especially if they aren’t familiar with a candidate’s work. Others will be able to rely on other things, from numbers of papers and citations to informal assessments of a scientist’s impact. I genuinely don’t know whether the journals I published in made any impact at all when I was hired, and I’m a bit afraid to ask. I haven’t yet sat on the kind of committee that makes these decisions, so I don’t know what things look like from the other side either.

But I do know that, on a certain level, journals and publications can’t matter quite as much as we think. As I mentioned, my field doesn’t use Nature or Science, while others do. A grant agency or hiring committee comparing two scientists would have to take that into account, just as they have to take into account the thousands of authors on every single paper by the ATLAS and CMS experiments. If a field started publishing every paper regardless of quality, they’d have to adapt there too, and find a new way to judge people compatible with that.

Can we just publish everything, papers and referee letters and responses and letters and reviews? Maybe. I think there are fields where this could really work well, and fields where it would collapse into the invective of a YouTube comments section. I’m not sure where my own field sits. Theoretical particle physics is relatively small and close-knit, but it’s also cool and popular, with many strong and dumb opinions floating around. I’d like to believe we could handle it, that we could prune back the professional cruft and turn our field into a real conversation between scholars. But I don’t know.

A Significant Calculation

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Particle physicists have a weird relationship to journals. We publish all our results for free on a website called the arXiv, and when we need to read a paper that’s the first place we look. But we still submit our work to journals, because we need some way to vouch that we’re doing good work. Explicit numbers (h-index, impact factor) are falling out of favor, but we still need to demonstrate that we get published in good journals, that we do enough work, and that work has an impact on others. We need it to get jobs, to get grants to fund research at those jobs, and to get future jobs for the students and postdocs we hire with those grants. Our employers need it to justify their own funding, to summarize their progress so governments and administrators can decide who gets what.

This can create weird tensions. When people love a topic, they want to talk about it with each other. They want to say all sorts of things, big and small, to contribute new ideas and correct others and move things forward. But as professional physicists, we also have to publish papers. We can publish some “notes”, little statements on the arXiv that we don’t plan to make into a paper, but we don’t really get “credit” for those. So in practice, we try to force anything we want to say into a paper-sized chunk.

That wouldn’t be a problem if paper-sized chunks were flexible, and you can see when journals historically tried to make them that way. Some journals publish “letters”, short pieces a few pages long, to contrast with their usual papers that can run from twenty to a few hundred pages. These “letters” tend to be viewed as prestigious, though, so they end up being judged on roughly the same standards as the normal papers, if not more strictly.

What standards are those? For each journal, you can find an official list. The Journal of High-Energy Physics, for example, instructs reviewers to look for “high scientific
quality, originality and relevance”. That rules out papers that just reproduce old results, but otherwise is frustratingly vague. What constitutes high scientific quality? Relevant to whom?

In practice, reviewers use a much fuzzier criterion: is this “paper-like”? Does this look like other things that get published, or not?

Each field will assess that differently. It’s a criterion of familiarity, of whether a paper looks like what people in the field generally publish. In my field, one rule of thumb is that a paper must contain a significant calculation.

A “significant calculation” is still quite fuzzy, but the idea is to make sure that a paper requires some amount of actual work. Someone has to do something challenging, and the work shouldn’t be half-done: as much as feasible, they should finish, and calculate something new. Ideally, this should be something that nobody had calculated before, but if the perspective is new enough it can be something old. It should “look hard”, though.

That’s a fine way to judge whether someone is working hard, which is something we sometimes want to judge. But since we’re incentivized to make everything into a paper, this means that every time we want to say something, we want to accompany it with some “significant calculation”, some concrete time-consuming work. This can happen even if we want to say something that’s quite direct and simple, a fact that can be quickly justified but nonetheless has been ignored by the field. If we don’t want it to be “just” an un-credited note, we have to find some way to turn it into a “significant calculation”. We do extra work, sometimes pointless work, in order to make something “paper-sized”.

I like to think about what academia would be like without the need to fill out a career. The model I keep imagining is that of a web forum or a blogging platform. There would be the big projects, the in-depth guides and effortposts. But there would also be shorter contributions, people building off each other, comments on longer pieces and quick alerts pinned to the top of the page. We’d have a shared record of knowledge, where everyone contributes what they want to whatever level of detail they want.

I think math is a bit closer to this ideal. Despite their higher standards for review, checking the logic of every paper to make sure it makes sense to publish, math papers can sometimes be very short, or on apparently trivial things. Physics doesn’t quite work this way, and I suspect part of it is our funding sources. If you’re mostly paid to teach, like many mathematicians, your research is more flexible. If you’re paid to research, like many physicists, then people want to make sure your research is productive, and that tends to cram it into measurable boxes.

In today’s world, I don’t think physics can shift cultures that drastically. Even as we build new structures to rival the journals, the career incentives remain. Physics couldn’t become math unless it shed most of the world’s physicists.

In the long run, though…well, we may one day find ourselves in a world where we don’t have to work all our days to keep each other alive. And if we do, hopefully we’ll change how scientists publish.

IPhT-60 Retrospective

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Last week, my institute had its 60th anniversary party, which like every party in academia takes the form of a conference.

For unclear reasons, this one also included a physics-themed arcade game machine.

Going in, I knew very little about the history of the Institute of Theoretical Physics, of the CEA it’s part of (Commissariat of Atomic Energy, now Atomic and Alternative Energy), or of French physics in general, so I found the first few talks very interesting. I learned that in France in the early 1950’s, theoretical physics was quite neglected. Key developments, like relativity and statistical mechanics, were seen as “too German” due to their origins with Einstein and Boltzmann (nevermind that this was precisely why the Nazis thought they were “not German enough”), while de Broglie suppressed investigation of quantum mechanics. It took French people educated abroad to come back and jumpstart progress.

The CEA is, in a sense, the French equivalent of the some of the US’s national labs, and like them got its start as part of a national push towards nuclear weapons and nuclear power.

(Unlike the US’s national labs, the CEA is technically a private company. It’s not even a non-profit: there are for-profit components that sell services and technology to the energy industry. Never fear, my work remains strictly useless.)

My official title is Ingénieur Chercheur, research engineer. In the early days, that title was more literal. Most of the CEA’s first permanent employees didn’t have PhDs, but were hired straight out of undergraduate studies. The director, Claude Bloch, was in his 40’s, but most of the others were in their 20’s. There was apparently quite a bit of imposter syndrome back then, with very young people struggling to catch up to the global state of the art.

They did manage to catch up, though, and even excel. In the 60’s and 70’s, researchers at the institute laid the groundwork for a lot of ideas that are popular in my field at the moment. Stora’s work established a new way to think about symmetry that became the textbook approach we all learn in school, while Froissart figured out a consistency condition for high-energy physics whose consequences we’re still teasing out. Pham was another major figure at the institute in that era. With my rudimentary French I started reading his work back in Copenhagen, looking for new insights. I didn’t go nearly as fast as my partner in the reading group though, whose mastery of French and mathematics has seen him use Pham’s work in surprising new ways.

Hearing about my institute’s past, I felt a bit of pride in the physicists of the era, not just for the science they accomplished but for the tools they built to do it. This was the era of preprints, first as physical papers, orange folders mailed to lists around the world, and later online as the arXiv. Physicists here were early adopters of some aspects, though late adopters of others (they were still mailing orange folders a ways into the 90’s). They also adopted computation, with giant punch-card reading, sheets-of-output-producing computers staffed at all hours of the night. A few physicists dove deep into the new machines, and guided the others as capabilities changed and evolved, while others were mostly just annoyed by the noise!

When the institute began, scientific papers were still typed on actual typewriters, with equations handwritten in or typeset in ingenious ways. A pool of secretaries handled much of the typing, many of whom were able to come to the conference! I wonder what they felt, seeing what the institute has become since.

I also got to learn a bit about the institute’s present, and by implication its future. I saw talks covering different areas, from multiple angles on mathematical physics to simulations of large numbers of particles, quantum computing, and machine learning. I even learned a bit from talks on my own area of high-energy physics, highlighting how much one can learn from talking to new people.

Physics’ Unique Nightmare

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Halloween is coming up, so let’s talk about the most prominent monster of the physics canon, the nightmare scenario.

Not to be confused with the D&D Nightmare, which once was a convenient source of infinite consumable items for mid-level characters.

Right now, thousands of physicists search for more information about particle physics beyond our current Standard Model. They look at data from the Large Hadron Collider to look for signs of new particles and unexpected behavior, they try to detect a wide range of possible dark matter particles, and they make very precise measurements to try to detect subtle deviations. And in the back of their minds, almost all of those physicists wonder if they’ll find anything at all.

It’s not that we think the Standard Model is right. We know it has problems, deep mathematical issues that make it give nonsense answers and an apparent big mismatch with what we observe about the motion of matter and light in the universe. (You’ve probably heard this mismatch called dark matter and dark energy.)

But none of those problems guarantee an answer soon. The Standard Model will eventually fail, but it may fail only for very difficult and expensive experiments, not a Large Hadron Collider but some sort of galactic-scale Large Earth Collider. It might be that none of the experiments or searches or theories those thousands of physicists are working on will tell them anything they didn’t already know. That’s the nightmare scenario.

I don’t know another field that has a nightmare scenario quite like this. In most fields, one experiment or another might fail, not just not giving the expected evidence but not teaching anything new. But most experiments teach us something new. We don’t have a theory, in almost any field, that has the potential to explain every observation up to the limits of our experiments, but which we still hope to disprove. Only the Standard Model is like that.

And while thousands of physicists are exposed to this nightmare scenario, the majority of physicists aren’t. Physics isn’t just the science of the reductionistic laws of the smallest constituents of matter. It’s also the study of physical systems, from the bubbling chaos of nuclear physics to the formation of planets and galaxies and black holes, to the properties of materials to the movement of bacteria on a petri dish and bees in a hive. It’s also the development of new methods, from better control of individual atoms and quantum states to powerful new tricks for calculation. For some, it can be the discovery, not of reductionistic laws of the smallest scales, but of general laws of the largest scales, of how systems with many different origins can show echoes of the same behavior.

Over time, more and more of those thousands of physicists break away from the nightmare scenario, “waking up” to new questions of these kinds. For some, motivated by puzzles and skill and the beauty of physics, the change is satisfying, a chance to work on ideas that are moving forward, connected with experiment or grounded in evolving mathematics. But if your motivation is really tied to those smallest scales, to that final reductionistic “why”, then such a shift won’t be satisfying, and this is a nightmare you won’t wake up from.

Me, I’m not sure. I’m a tool-builder, and I used to tell myself that tool-builders are always needed. But I find I do care, in the end, what my tools are used for. And as we approach the nightmare scenario, I’m not at all sure I know how to wake up.

Academic Hiring: My Field vs. Bret’s

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Bret Deveraux is a historian and history-blogger who’s had a rough time on the academic job market. He recently had a post about how academic hiring works, at least in his corner of academia. Since we probably have some overlap in audience (and should have more, if you’re at all interested in ancient history he’s got some great posts), I figured I’d make a post of my own pointing out how my field, and fields nearby, do things differently.

First, there’s a big difference in context. The way Bret describes things, it sounds like he’s applying only to jobs in the US (maybe also Canada?). In my field, you can do that (the US is one of a few countries big enough to do that), but in practice most searches are at least somewhat international. If you look at the Rumor Mill, you’ll see a fair bit of overlap between US searches and UK searches, for example.

Which brings up another difference: rumor mills! It can be hard for applicants to get a clear picture of what’s going on. Universities sometimes forget to let applicants know they weren’t shortlisted, or even that someone else was hired. Rumor mills are an informal way to counteract this. They’re websites where people post which jobs are advertised in a given year, who got shortlisted, and who eventually got offered the job. There’s a rumor mill for the US market (including some UK jobs anyway), a UK rumor mill, a German/Nordic rumor mill (which also has a bunch of Italian jobs on it, to the seeming annoyance of the organizers), and various ones that I haven’t used but are linked on the US one’s page.

Bret describes a seasonal market with two stages: a first stage aimed at permanent positions, and a second stage for temporary adjunct teaching positions. My field doesn’t typically do adjuncts, so we just have the first stage. This is usually, like Bret’s field, something that happens in the Fall through Winter, but in Europe institutional funding decisions can get made later in the year, so I’ve seen new permanent positions get advertised even into the early Spring.

(Our temporary positions are research-focused, and advertised at basically the same time of year as the faculty positions, with the caveat that there is a special rule for postdocs. Due to a widely signed agreement, we in high-energy theory have agreed to not require postdocs to make a decision about whether they will accept a position until Feb 15 at the earliest. This stopped what used to be an arms race, with positions requiring postdocs to decide earlier and earlier in order to snatch the good ones before other places could make offers. The deadline was recently pushed a bit later yet, to lower administrative load during the Christmas break.)

Bret also describes two stages of interviews, a long-list interviewed on Zoom (that used to be interviewed at an important conference) and a short-list interviewed on campus. We just have the latter: while there are sometimes long-lists, they’re usually an internal affair, and I can’t think of a conference you could expect everyone to go to for interviews anyway. Our short-lists are also longer than his: I was among eight candidates when I interviewed for my position, which is a little high but not unheard of, five is quite typical.

His description of the actual campus visit matches my experience pretty well. There’s a dedicated talk, and something that resembles a “normal job interview”, but the rest, conversations from the drive in to the dinners if they organize them, are all interviews on some level too.

(I would add though, that while everyone there is trying to sort out if you’d be a good fit for them, you should also try to sort out if they’d be a good fit for you. I’ll write more about this another time, but I’m increasingly convinced that a key element in my landing a permanent position was the realization that, rather than just trying for every position I where I plausibly had a chance, I should focus on positions where I would actually be excited to collaborate with folks there.)

Bret’s field, as mentioned, has a “second round” of interviews for temporary positions, including adjuncts and postdocs. We don’t have adjuncts, but we do have postdocs, and they mostly interview at the same time the faculty do. For Bret, this wouldn’t make any sense, because anyone applying for postdocs is also applying for faculty positions, but in my field there’s less overlap. For one, very few people apply for faculty positions right out of their PhD: almost everyone, except those viewed as exceptional superstars, does at least one postdoc first. After that, you can certainly have collisions, with someone taking a postdoc and then getting a faculty job. The few times I’ve broached this possibility with people, they were flexible: most people have no hard feelings if a postdoc accepts a position and then changes their mind when they get a faculty job, and many faculty jobs let people defer a year, so they can do their postdoc and then start their faculty job afterwards.

(It helps that my field never seems to have all that much pressure to fill teaching roles. I’m not sure why (giant lecture courses using fewer profs? more research funding meaning we don’t have to justify ourselves with more undergrad majors?), but it’s probably part of why we don’t seem to hire adjuncts very often.)

Much like in Bret’s field, we usually need to submit a cover letter, CV, research statement, and letters of recommendation. Usually we submit a teaching statement, not a portfolio: some countries (Denmark) have been introducing portfolios but for now they’re not common. Diversity statements are broadly speaking a US and Canada thing: you will almost always need to submit one for a job in those places (one memorable job I looked at asserted that Italian-American counted as diversity), and sometimes in the UK, but much more rarely elsewhere in Europe (I can think of only one example). You never need to submit transcripts except if you’re applying to some unusually bureaucracy-obsessed country. “Writing samples” sometimes take the form of requests for a few important published papers: most places don’t ask for this, though. Our cover letters are less fixed (I’ve never heard a two-page limit, and various jobs actually asked for quite different things). While most jobs require three letters of recommendation, I was surprised to learn (several years in to applying…) that one sometimes can submit more, with three just being a minimum.

Just like Bret’s field, these statements all need to be tailored to the job to some extent (something I once again appreciated more a few years in). That does mean a lot of work, because much like Bret’s field there are often only a few reasonable permanent jobs one can apply for worldwide each year (maybe more than 6-12, but that depends on what you’re looking for), and they essentially all have hundreds of applicants. I won’t comment as much on how hiring decisions get made, except to say that my field seems a little less dysfunctional than Bret’s with “just out of PhD” hires quite rare and most people doing a few postdocs before finding a position. Still, there is a noticeable bias towards comparatively fresh PhDs, and this is reinforced by the European grant system: the ERC Starting Grant is a huge sum of money compared to many other national grants, and you can only apply for it within seven years from your PhD. The ERC Consolidator Grant can be applied for later (twelve years from PhD), but has higher standards (I’m working on an application for it this year). If you aren’t able to apply for either of those, then a lot of European institutions won’t consider you.

On the Care and Feeding of International Employees

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Science and scholarship are global. If you want to find out the truth about the universe, you’ll have to employ the people best at figuring out that truth, regardless of where they come from. Research shuffles people around, driving them together to collaborate and apart to share their expertise.

(If you don’t care about figuring out the truth, and just want to make money? You still may want international employees. For plenty of jobs, the difference between the best person in the world and the best person in your country can be quite substantial.)

How do you get these international employees? You could pay them a lot, I guess, but that’s by definition expensive, and probably will annoy the locals. Instead, most of what you need to do to attract international employees isn’t to give them extra rewards: instead, it’s more important to level the playing field, and cover for the extra disadvantages an international employee will have.

You might be surprised when I mention disadvantages, but while international employees may be talented people, that doesn’t make moving to another country easy. If you stay in the same country you were born, you get involved in that country’s institutions in a regular way. Your rights and responsibilities, everything from driving to healthcare to taxes, are set up gradually over the course of your life. For someone moving to a new country, that means all of this has to be set up all at once.

This means that countries that can process these things quickly are much better for international employees. If your country takes six months to register someone for national healthcare, then new employees are at risk during that time or will have to pay extra for private insurance. If a national ID number is required to get a bank account, then whatever processing time that ID number takes must pass before the new employee can get paid. It also matters if the rules are clearly and consistently communicated, as new international employees can waste a lot of time and money if they’re given incorrect advice, or if different bureaucrats enforce different rules at their own discretion.

It also means that employers have an advantage if they can smooth entry into these institutions. In some countries it can be quite hard to find a primary care physician, as most people have the same doctor as their parents, switching only when a doctor retires. When I worked with the Perimeter Institute, they had a relationship with a local clinic that would accept their new employees as clients. In a city where it was otherwise quite hard to find a doctor, that was a real boon. Employers can also offer consistent advice even when their government doesn’t. They can keep track of their employees experiences and make reliable guides for how to navigate the system. If they can afford it, they can even keep an immigration lawyer on staff to advise about these questions.

An extremely important institution is the language itself. Moving internationally will often involve moving somewhere where you don’t speak the language, or don’t speak it very well. This gives countries an advantage if their immigrant-facing institutions are proficient in a language that’s common internationally, which at the moment largely means English. It also means countries have a big advantage if their immigrant-facing institutions are digital. If you communicate with immigrants with text, they can find online translations and at least try to figure things out. If you communicate in person, or worse through a staticky phone line, then you will try the patience even of people who do passably speak the language.

In the long term, of course, one cannot get by in one’s native language alone. As such, it is also important for countries to have good ways for people to learn the language. While I lived there, Denmark went back and forth on providing free language lessons for recent immigrants, sometimes providing them and sometimes not.

All of these things become twice as important in the case of spouses. You might think the idea that a country or employer should help out a new employee’s spouse is archaic, a product of an era of housewives discouraged from supporting themselves. But it is precisely because we don’t live in such an era that countries and employers need to take spouses into account. For an employer, hiring someone from another country is already an unusual event. Two partners getting hired to move to the same country by different employers at the same time is, barring special arrangements, extremely unlikely. That means that spouses of international employees should not have to wait for an employer to give them the same rights as their spouse: they need the same right to healthcare and employment and the like as their spouse, on arrival, so that they can find jobs and integrate without an unfair disadvantage. An employer can level the playing field further. The University of Copenhagen’s support for international spouses included social events (important because it’s hard to make new friends in a new country without the benefit of work friends), resume help (because each country has different conventions and expectations for job seekers), and even legal advice. At minimum, every resource you provide your employees that could in principle also be of use to their spouses (language classes, help with bureaucracy) should be considered.

In all your planning, as a country or an employer, keep in mind that not everyone has the same advantages. You can’t assume that someone moving to a new country will be able to integrate on their own. You have to help them, if not for fairness’ sake, then because if you don’t you won’t keep getting international employees to come at all.

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.