Doing a quick poll of graduate students in our department showed the following:
- Atomic Physics: 5/10 grad students are married (2 of those have kids)
- Particle Physics (CMS group): 1/10 grad students are married (none of those have kids)
Most likely, this difference is because “Atomic” physics involves small, table-top experiments, while “Particle” physics involves large experiments located on another continent.
This leads to other differences as well: 3 1.5/10 Particle physics grads above are in long-term, long-distance relationships (they live at CERN), meanwhile, none of the grad students in Atomic physics are in a long-distance relationship (their experiments are conveniently located in the same city).
What is it like at your university, or your research group? Is this just a statistical anomaly, or is there really far fewer married graduate students in particle physics than in other research areas?
Tags: relationships, student life
The stats are interesting, and it would be fun to get more of them, and from other fields.
I’d question the “most likely,” reason for this, though, as there are sure to be many other distinguishable or indistinguishable differences between the job and the people from each perspective field that could “cause” this to be the case.
I like your blog!
Assuming a flat Bayesian prior, and no correlations between group members (e.g. them being married to each other), one gets the following error bars on the probability of being married by field:
Atomic physics: 0.500 + 0.144 – 0.144
Particle physics: 0.100 + 0.118 – 0.068
So you can’t claim an observation yet!
But yes, we all know that moving back and forth between continents is a complicating factor in particle physicists’ relationships. Perhaps a tendency to bring excessive statistics to bear on anecdotal evidence is a contributing factor also.