The Trouble with Falling in Love While Studying Physics

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IT is quite distracting to fall in love while studying physics. I’m talking about experience. I am not talking about an esoteric passion for equations or a metaphorical obsession with the laws of nature (although I lived them too). I’m talking about real real, dizzying, wonderful human romance. The genre that makes you want to throw your physics books (almost) and sing songs on the birds that chirp and flowers that bloom while walking hand in hand.

Fortunately for my career, he was a student colleague graduated in physics, and ours was a romance filled with debates on quantum physics, while we have jumped lessons and ignored research projects in favor of bicycle walks and nature hikes, concerts and films. The space-time had obviously distorted to bring us together. On the eve of the new millennium, we decided to greet the 21st century as partners for life.

Our marriage was a joyful and cheesy affair, celebrated by our two families as well as by our family of common physics of students, staff and teachers. Wedding invitations included quotes from physicists, and many bad jokes in physics were shared and yelled at the reception. In our own moment “Gift of the Physics Magi”, our thesis supervisors asked us which gift we would like to mark the opportunity. I asked for a beautiful linked copy of Feynman Physics conferences For my fiancé, not knowing that he had done the same thing for me.

As we settle in marital life, my doctorate. Research in the emerging field of quantum information sciences has progressed rapidly. I had a lot of chance of working in a new field where every question I explored gave exciting results (something that is rather unusual in most other areas of research in physics). I particularly liked to study quantum entanglement – the particular version of the link between microscopic particles. In one way or another, I could identify myself with the link between the tangled pairs that I studied.

Before I know, three years have zoomed and I managed to finish and defend my thesis. I was offered a postdoctoral research position of dreams, but it would require more than 9,000 miles from my partner. The space-time held in the other direction and separated us.

I was far from the first woman to have to choose between career and family. But in our case, there was the additional wrinkle that we both wanted a university career in physics, which seriously limited our options. This challenge is sufficiently common in the academic world that it has its own nickname borrowed from a well -known problem in physics – the “two -body problem”.

The story is filled with women who have been faced with similar dilemmas, and most often, physics has lost.

Take the case of Harriet Brooks – The first nuclear physicist woman in Canada. In less than six years between 1898 and 1904, Brooks discovered the Radon element, measured its half-life, launched the understanding of the radioactive transmutation of the elements, discovered the effect of radioactive decline and highlighted the multiple stages of radioactive decay. Along the way, she had become the first woman to obtain a graduate diploma at McGill University and the first woman to work with two future winners of the Nobel Prize. She had proven her skills in three renowned university institutions, and she had published an article by herself Nature.

I was far from the first woman to have to choose between career and family.

However, she had to abandon her faculty post at the Barnard College after announcing her engagement. BARNARD, founded in 1889 in response to the policy of the University of Columbia not to admit students, insisted that it resigns. His advisor, the winner of the Nobel Prize winner Ernest Rutherford, recognized her brilliance, describing her as another Marie Curie, but that was not enough to save her career.

Harriet Brooks is not the only woman that physics has lost because of the gender variable.

Lucy Mensing, who carried out revolutionary research in the emerging field of quantum mechanics, ended her career in physics in 1930 after the birth of her first son. In Australia, Ruby Payne Scott paved the way on radio-astronomy and later chose to start a family, but without any maternity leave option, she abandoned her career.

In England, Muriel Barker graduated from Cambridge in 1915 (although as a woman, she has not officially received a Cambridge diploma). She then continued her higher education in aeronautics in Cambridge. In 1922, she published new perspectives on the wind speed flowing in a narrow bar, but the same year, she struck the “wedding bar” – a common policy in the United Kingdom which prevented married women from continuing to work.

Who knows how many additional women have disappeared from the world of physics? All over the world, the wedding bar has swept away the ranks of scientific women, removing all traces of the scientific file.

I Often listen to the affirmation that physics is an objective science in which there is no room for discussions on gender and identity. After all, the equations used in physics are neutral gender. In the famous Newton equation F = mamethe variable F means strength, not female. And yet, this objective area is full of very subjective human bias. The sex of Harriet Brooks certainly had the impression of the choices which she was confronted with. There was no common ground for her. It was physics or family. Physics was the worst for that.

Over the years, his decision has led his name to the discoloration of the historic file. Friedrich Dorn obtained the merit of discovering the radon (in reality, his newspaper said little about his nature, while it was Brooks and Rutherford who identified him for the first time as a new gas). From Marie Curie and Harriet Brooks, the story only remembers Curie.

As for my own choice of physics compared to the family, I was not a similar exception to Curie. Choosing to follow my research dreams in Australia meant putting physics before the family, and I couldn’t do it. On the other hand, I refused to give in to the wedding bar. Above all, I had one thing in common with Curie – a support partner. We made a pact, our personal solution to the two -bodies problem. We will also face the wedding bar. We would never put our individual university career before our common personal life. Thus, Australia had come out.

A few years later, an equally attractive research opportunity presented itself for my partner in Europe. This too was Nixé. We knew, of course, that our solution to the two -body problem could not work forever. The real solution would be for university establishments to accommodate couples with new “marriage support” policies rather than “wedding bar” policies. But there are hardly such politicians, even today.

Finally, our winding career paths and our valiant efforts to balance the family and the academics took the lead. We have never found a double solution to the two -bodies problem. We were forced to face the wedding bar. I embarked on a university career as a freshly struck physics teacher. My partner has chosen to leave physics.

I often wonder what I would say to Harriet Brooks if I had the privilege of meeting her. I would have a thousand questions for her, of course, but what would I say about me? I would like to describe my research in physics, I am sure. But I would also like her to meet the man who curls up space for me. He carved out a new niche in the continuum in a new sparkling career, and he found a way to settle in the two of us. And he never looked back. He and Harriet would have a lot to say.

This extract is reprinted with the permission of MIT Press reader. It is suitable for His space, his time.

Lead image: Mnaufal Design / Shutterstock

• Shohini Ghose

  Published on September 4, 2025

  Shohini Ghose is a professor of physics and computer science at Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada. She is director of Laurier Center for Women in Science (Wins) and the President of the CRSG for women in science and genius. She is the author of His space, his time.