Peter Pan should have been a cosmologist. I mean, if you want to stay forever young, nothing puts things in perspective like contemplating our place in a fourteen-billion-year-old universe. You tend to take a long view of things.
But eventually, one must grow up and start acting like an adult. Did you realize, for example, that many grownups participate in an institution known as “marriage,” which apparently involves tying your entire future history (and let’s be clear about this — I fully expect to be immortal) to that of another person? Someone, obviously, who you better like an awful lot. And who better be able to put up with you. Trust me, you really don’t want to interact with me before I’ve had my coffee in the morning.
How in the world is one expected to find such a person, in a world full of interesting but flawed characters? Well, there’s always the blogosphere. Two kindred spirits, tapping away at their matching MacBook Pros, could find each other across thousands of miles in a way that was heretofore impossible.
All of which, in a fumbling and hopefully-charming way, is to say that it’s happened. I’ve fallen hopelessly for the beautiful and talented Jennifer Ouellette, science writer extraordinaire and proprietess of Cocktail Party Physics. I first plugged her blog (completely innocently! honestly!) back in March, and we met in person at an APS meeting, of all places. Best conference ever.
And, various cross-country jaunts and countless emails later, we’re engaged to be married. If it’s clear that you’ve found the perfect person with whom you want nothing more than to spend the rest of your life, you might was well get the presents, right?
Expressions of astonishment that I could have done so well by myself, and wonderings aloud concerning what in the world Jennifer must be thinking, may be left in the comment section. You needn’t tell me how fortunate I am — I know.
November 17th, 2006 at 1:04 pm
Many, many congrats, Sean! You’ve definitely found a great person. I hope you’re both deleriously happy together. Cheers!
November 17th, 2006 at 1:07 pm
So exciting! Many many congrats! And exclamation points!
November 17th, 2006 at 1:13 pm
Congratulations!
I love it that your courtship sort of started up in e-mail. Although my wife and I met in person first, some stage of our courtship was sort of in e-mail (in that we’d see each other about once a week at church, but would e-mail back and forth a fair amount in between that).
…and people say that the Internet is distancing us from each other, destroying personal relationships and human interaction. Foo! It’s an enabler!
-Rob
November 17th, 2006 at 1:25 pm
CONGRATULATIONS!!!!
A Match Made In … Blogosphere!
November 17th, 2006 at 1:27 pm
Sean, all the best!!!
PS..good to see you last week..excellent talk!
November 17th, 2006 at 1:27 pm
Congratulations Sean. You sound very happy. That is always good.
November 17th, 2006 at 1:30 pm
This is incredible! I can’t believe you waited until this fall to tell us who won the Ultimate Showdown even though there was a winner back in April.
>Two kindred spirits, tapping away at their matching MacBook Pros, could find each
>other across thousands of miles in a way that was heretofore impossible.
Congrats to you both!
November 17th, 2006 at 1:35 pm
Congratulations! I’m happy for you both
November 17th, 2006 at 1:36 pm
Aww, Sean, Congrats
November 17th, 2006 at 1:37 pm
Congratulations! This duo who also found each other across thousands of miles (and an ocean) in a way that was heretofore impossible wishes you all the best. ~ Shakes and Mr. Shakes
November 17th, 2006 at 1:40 pm
Congratulations to the both of you!!
November 17th, 2006 at 1:41 pm
Congratulations!
November 17th, 2006 at 1:50 pm
Congratulations!
November 17th, 2006 at 2:04 pm
Congratulations! *toasts* The best of everything to you both!
November 17th, 2006 at 2:08 pm
Very many congratulations to you both!!!
November 17th, 2006 at 2:40 pm
Congrats
November 17th, 2006 at 2:44 pm
Woo! Woo!
Congratulations Sean!!!
November 17th, 2006 at 2:45 pm
Hm. I wonder if we’re all invited to the wedding. And if they’ll have an open bar.
November 17th, 2006 at 2:50 pm
Congratulations!
NM
November 17th, 2006 at 2:55 pm
Congrats!
November 17th, 2006 at 2:56 pm
Congratulations Sean!
November 17th, 2006 at 3:05 pm
Congrats on the engagement, Sean!
November 17th, 2006 at 3:22 pm
Yes, all the best to you both.
November 17th, 2006 at 3:33 pm
Heartiest congratulations to you both!
Like Rob Knop and his wife, the PharmGirl and I met briefly in the meat-world but then also courted extensively via e-mail; when that’s all you have, it’s amazing how much you learn about one another. We finally bridged the geography and just celebrated six years of marriage.
Wishing you both all the happiness in the world!
November 17th, 2006 at 3:34 pm
Congratulations, I wish the both of you the best.
November 17th, 2006 at 3:36 pm
Congratulations, Sean!
November 17th, 2006 at 3:57 pm
congratulations sean!
November 17th, 2006 at 4:19 pm
Hearty congratulations!!!
November 17th, 2006 at 4:27 pm
Congratulations !!!
November 17th, 2006 at 4:29 pm
Or was it written in the stars
you know
since the beginning of Time!
-
Sean, all the best to you both!
.
November 17th, 2006 at 4:33 pm
I can see a book there
“They met in blogosphere …”
love and love of cosmology & science
November 17th, 2006 at 6:03 pm
You ended up being mentioned in Sciam!
Congrats!
November 17th, 2006 at 6:07 pm
Felicidades! Wishing the best for both of you (and Jen-Luc, of course).
November 17th, 2006 at 6:29 pm
What is this thing called love? Who knows except for those who love, fall in love and follow where it leads. Thanks for telling us this good news and best wishes. Congratulations to both of you.
November 17th, 2006 at 6:44 pm
Hooray!
November 17th, 2006 at 7:30 pm
Many congrats, Sean! I must echo what Rob Knop said above, since my wife and I would never have gotten together if we didn’t have email during the first year — dating, but on opposite coasts. It’s a uniter, not a divider! (sorry…)
November 17th, 2006 at 7:59 pm
First of all, congrats for you both!!!
OK, the South is much better anyway: you could not do that in Chicago
November 17th, 2006 at 8:20 pm
Hearty congratulations to both of you.
November 17th, 2006 at 8:37 pm
CONGRATULATIONS!!
Sean, this is *really* strange, but I have to say something now. A few months ago, I followed a link on one of your blogs to Jennifer’s blog. I read a little of her writings, saw her photo, and a random thought popped into my head: this woman seems perfect for Sean. Of course you don’t know me, but please take my word when I say that I’m NOT one of those matchmaker types, acting as a catalyst for pair bonds. From time to time I have come across links from CV posts to Jennifer’s blog and this same thought kept popping into my head. Well, my gut instinct was right on the mark!!
November 17th, 2006 at 8:47 pm
CONGRATULATIONS!!!!
Jennifer may have stolen my secret blog crush, but no hard feelings.
We must have pictures of the wedding.
November 17th, 2006 at 8:47 pm
Congrats Sean! Jennifer is absolutely GREAT, but then, I’m not saying anything you don’t know.
PS: Didn’t know that you actually bought that bag of plagues!
November 17th, 2006 at 9:00 pm
Congratulation Sean! By the way this his might be one the first weddings in the science blogosphere! I hope we are all invited to the wedding
November 17th, 2006 at 9:14 pm
Great news, Sean. Many congratulations!!!
But still, “no time for blogging” will not be an excuse.
November 17th, 2006 at 10:22 pm
Immortal? Really?
I hope that Jennifer will be too!
Congratulations Sean and Jennifer!
November 18th, 2006 at 12:16 am
Many congratulations.
November 18th, 2006 at 12:19 am
Vive le sposi! Congrats Sean
November 18th, 2006 at 1:04 am
From a fan of both your blogs: Hearty Congratulations!
November 18th, 2006 at 1:08 am
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAH CONGRATS! I hope whoever’s performing the service won’t be too put off when she sees the crowd packed with physicists tapping away on their laptops…
November 18th, 2006 at 1:14 am
Congratulations to you both!
November 18th, 2006 at 2:28 am
Congratulations!!!
November 18th, 2006 at 2:52 am
congrats sean!
November 18th, 2006 at 3:00 am
ç¥ç¦ä½ 们ï¼Many congratulations to both of you!
November 18th, 2006 at 5:16 am
Congratulazioni e Auguri !
From a faithful italian reader.
November 18th, 2006 at 6:01 am
I thought Sean was gay!!!!!
November 18th, 2006 at 7:33 am
Congratulations to you both.
The total happiness of the world just went up a bit which is always most welcomed.
November 18th, 2006 at 8:48 am
Good luck, old stick. Marriage is pretty cool.
November 18th, 2006 at 8:56 am
[...] Escribir una bitácora sobre ciencia puede tener su punto de controversia, pero de lo que no hay duda es que también tiene recompensas. Dicen que el amor es fÃsica, y el matrimonio quÃmica. De ser asÃ, debe haber mucho amor entre Sean Carroll, propietario de Cosmic Variance, una de las bitácoras sobre fÃsica más populares, y Jennifer Ouellette, escritora cientÃfica, y proprietaria de Cocktail Party Physics, otra bitácora sobre fÃsica. De hecho, se han prometido en matrimonio, tal como Sean anuncia aquÃ, y Jennifer aquÃ, ocho meses después de conocerse a través de la bitácora. Enhorabuena a la feliz pareja. Ahora les toca demostrar la segunda parte del aforismo, y reciclarse en buenos quÃmicos. [...]
November 18th, 2006 at 12:03 pm
Such happy news! Congratulations to both of you.
November 18th, 2006 at 12:57 pm
Thanks to everybody for the congratulations! To answer some implicit and explicit questions:
1. We will be sharing the bag of plagues.
2. Secret blog crushes on one or both parties are still permitted.
3. Everyone is invited to the wedding! Which will be live-blogged from start to finish, including by the bride and groom!
Okay, that last point isn’t true. But perhaps there will be a picture or two.
November 18th, 2006 at 1:42 pm
Congratulations to you both!
November 18th, 2006 at 2:53 pm
Sharing the coveting of plagues seems about as good a reason as any to get married i suppose. Congratulations for the Solomonic wisdom. And while i personally am not one keen on the whole state-sanctioning of licensing contractual arrangements for the private lives of two individuals, i simply must ask about the location dilemma. I have to say i like what my own ex-wife #4 (hence my reticence to the institution at this point) chose to do with her recent state of matrimony. When i asked if she was packing up and moving, she said “Hell no!” The two of them, quite happily married after years of courtship and relating (he had the charm and sophistication to ask me if he could actually go out with her in the beginning [i couldn't have cared less]), live in their own private homes fifty miles from one another. They seem to be very happy, and my children and grandchildren report good tiding. So are you bi-coastaling for a while???
November 18th, 2006 at 3:11 pm
So I assume you’re going to have a big church wedding?
November 18th, 2006 at 4:23 pm
Okay, I can field the last two comments. First, Ix-nay on the Big Church Wedding, as regular CV readers no doubt expected.
It will be a decidedly non-deity-invoking ceremony.
Second, we’ve been doing the bicoastal thing, and it works pretty well, in the short-term. We’re communucators!
That certainly helps. And I know several couples with “long-distance” relationships who have been very happy that way. But long-term, I’d really prefer to be in the same city/household as Sean. I LIKE Sean and enjoy spending time with him. (If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have agreed to marry him.) Ergo, I’ll be relocating to Los Angeles in the next several months.
We’re fortunate in that we don’t have to struggle with the infamous “two body” problem: I’m self-employed and work from home, so it’s far easier for me to relocate, since I can do most of my work from anywhere. So, even though it’s a major change, and I might have to do some negotiating here and there, it’s not a major sacrifice, career-wise.
Besides, there’s that bag of plagues to consider… who wouldn’t move across the country for that?
November 18th, 2006 at 7:06 pm
Congratulations!
With yet another science blogger moving to California, it looks like the golden state is rapidly becoming the center of the science-blog universe.
November 18th, 2006 at 7:08 pm
Hi Sean
Take a look at these two videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZiIebst4fc&NR
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhYCeO67fCs
It is horrible seeing that in the library of UCLA a student is teased repeatedly by a police officer. Thanks to You Tube and celephone cameras.
November 18th, 2006 at 7:58 pm
CONGRATULATIONS!!!
November 18th, 2006 at 8:00 pm
The original video is in youtube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5g7zlJx9u2E
November 18th, 2006 at 9:12 pm
Congratulations to you both. You managed to find each other at the April APS meeting despite the frighteningly large number of teenage volleyball players there at the time
!
November 19th, 2006 at 12:17 am
Congratulations Sean! I wish you an eternity of happiness
November 19th, 2006 at 12:41 am
Congratulations and best wishes for you both.
November 19th, 2006 at 4:37 am
Congratulaions and all the best for your combined futures.
November 19th, 2006 at 5:35 am
Congratulations, and hurrah for the internet!
November 19th, 2006 at 8:06 am
How lovely. Even my hard heart is warmed by this delightful news.
November 19th, 2006 at 9:45 am
Congratulations to the two of you, and best wishes!
—-
Q: how does one Fourier transform the double-valued function that is the outline of a breaking wave?
November 19th, 2006 at 11:12 am
Congratulations and good luck!
Arun – if you mean the specific case of the Fourier series, you can’t take use a Fourier series (a sum of sine and/or sine waves) to model a breaking wave. It is possible to find a Fourier series to give almost anything approximately (including saw tooth wave forms and square waves), but not a breaking wave!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Periodic_identity_function.gif
November 19th, 2006 at 11:13 am
(meant “and/or cosine waves”)
November 19th, 2006 at 11:33 am
Wow
)) CONGRATULATIONS to both of you!
November 19th, 2006 at 12:22 pm
Congratulations to both of you! I hope the two of you are very happy together, and I wish you all the best for your shared future.
I was tempted to insert an entanglement joke, but I guess that would just lower the tone of the whole comment section.
November 19th, 2006 at 1:34 pm
Sean, that piece and Jennifers over a Cocktail Party Physics were beautiful. Congratulations to both of you.
Robin (3QD)
November 19th, 2006 at 3:41 pm
Congrats! Are your families bugging you about kids yet?
November 19th, 2006 at 5:06 pm
Congratulations!
November 19th, 2006 at 8:27 pm
Congratulations!
Ok then, only the regular CV posters are invited
November 19th, 2006 at 10:19 pm
I don’t want to sound like I own marriage or anything, but I tied the knot a month ago. So clearly you are copying me.
Congratulations!
November 20th, 2006 at 10:12 am
Hey, congratulations!
November 20th, 2006 at 10:25 am
It takes a lot more than liking to be in for the long run…and way more than enjoying each other’s company…but given that it is Sean, I have confidence that he knows what he is doing…the world probably needs some little Sean Carrolls running around…And LA and Tech are the best playgrounds for young minds and their parents…
This is definitely Sean Carroll’s year. First he escaped a terrible place and was sheltered in the best place on earth. Then he got Feynman’s desk. Then those supernova things got him excited to the point that he decided to get married…
Journey happily on…
November 20th, 2006 at 9:12 pm
Big congrats, Sean!
November 21st, 2006 at 12:23 am
Congratulations!
November 23rd, 2006 at 9:32 pm
Great news! Congratulations and all good wishes to you both.
November 24th, 2006 at 11:23 pm
Hooray Sean! Congrats to you and Jennifer! I’m a bit envious because I wanted the bag of plagues.
One learns a lot from one’s advisor — perhaps I should mention my plush burnt loaf of bread in my future dates?
November 26th, 2006 at 10:51 pm
Hey, congratulations! My husband and I also met in 1994 here in the invisible raum, which could back then, have passed for a secret room inside our imaginations. For several months we wrote back and forth across the Atlantic and out of a question-asked, a question-answered grew a warm, romantic friendship. A year later, I quit my job, packed my big ole hounddog, and 10 boxes of books and moved from the Midwest to Stuttgart, Germany.
In the midst of all that chaos and adventure it was really just a short step to falling deeply in love. We celebrated our 10th anniversary last April, and wish you both the happiness we have found.
December 19th, 2006 at 2:05 pm
Hi there!
I may be a wee bit prejudiced, as your intended has been my closest female friend since, oh, pretty much the dawn of time [a dangerous phrase to use around a cosmologist, but hey-I live for adventure]-but Jen is the most talented, lovely, kind, brilliant, loyal and generally GOOD person I know. (Except my mom, and she’s taken, fellas.) I have never seen her more radiantly happy.
Long may you both wave.
Big congrats
love
peri
February 10th, 2007 at 9:15 pm
Being Sean’s Mom has been an indescribably wonderful experience and I am now thrilled that Jennifer will join our family. Sean and Jennifer, you are wonderful people and I know you will make each other very happy (therefore me, too). Love, Mom
February 15th, 2007 at 3:25 am
Congratulations!
My wife is a full-time Physics professor. I’ve been an adjunct Astronomy Professor.
We met at a Science Fiction convention, on a continent other than the one where eaither of us had been born or brought up.
Yesterday, 14 Feb 2007, we celebrated our 21st wedding anniversary.
We still do research, even sometimes together.
We’ve managed to publish (a lot), raise a son (who’s about to get his double B.S. at age 18).
It can all be done.
It isn’t easy, but it is worth doing.
Best of luck to you both.
May 23rd, 2007 at 11:07 am
[...] In the short term, I worry that the most obvious effect will be a deleterious one for the bloggers. For the most part, I don’t think that hiring/tenure committees care if you have a blog, occasional anonymous scare-mongering notwithstanding. (It might even help.) But blogging about the process might be the kind of thing that makes committees nervous. Personally, I would never blog about a major occupational transition while it was going on; when it’s all set up and the ink is drying, it makes sense to let people know, but in the middle of the process I would be (with good reason) worried about stepping on people’s toes. (Same thing with getting engaged.) [...]
June 3rd, 2007 at 5:24 am
[...] to Jennifer Ouellette the owner of Cocktail Party Physics a few days back. Read their announcements here and here in their respective blogs, to know more of how science blogging featured in their [...]
November 13th, 2007 at 8:31 am
First of all, sorry for my english.
…reminds me of… Well, my wife and I met at a FirstClass BBS (an old-style one, not internet-based until later), and spent months knowing each other by public forum messages and by private mailing before we met in person. No pics sent. No real-time chatting. Lots of literature, cinema, theatre, and trivial issues discussed, debated and chewed between us (in Geneva, 10 or 12 pt. text), just workin’ to know each other better each day.
When we first met in person we were already in love. 10 years and a few days have passed since. A lovely daughter expanded our family. We’re still in love as we were a decade ago, and this lovely dream still continues.
Happiness does exist. We bear witness to that. And we’re glad you decided to join the club of the “happily married”. Perhaps it’s not an overcrowded one, heh, but it’s lovely, and especially when served –and when given the chance to serve– breakfast in bed.
Yeah, online communication is cold, yeah, yeah.
Exactly.
Go figure.
November 1st, 2008 at 11:58 pm
[...] to Jennifer Ouellette the owner of Cocktail Party Physics a few days back. Their announcements here and here talks about how science blogging featured in their [...]