Scientists in love: When two worlds collide

Our own 3quarksdaily guest columnist Jennifer Ouellette in Nature:

Jennifer_1 Last October, I became engaged to Caltech cosmologist Sean Carroll, capping six months of a long-distance romance that began via our respective physics blogs. Our his-and-hers blog announcements garnered the proverbial 15 minutes in the online scientific community, and it didn’t take long before someone asked: “So, will you be relocating to California?”

Of course I will move to Los Angeles from Washington DC. Like any romantic, I would move mountains to be with my beloved; a cross-country trek, yowling cat in tow, is trivial in comparison. Sean is well worth that and more. But then I’m a self-employed science writer. You can give me a mobile phone, a laptop and a high-speed Internet connection, and I can do my job from almost anywhere.

Alas, scientists who marry scientists can’t always get it together quite so easily. There is a daunting obstacle to be overcome: they must find jobs not just for themselves, but for their spouses. This is the ‘two-body’ problem: a reference to the challenge of calculating the paths of two objects interacting with each other. Mathematics solved the two-body problem long ago, but married scientists still struggle with it.

More here.