Two physicists, Neer Asherie and Deborah Berebichez, find love after thirteen years.
Neer Asherie is a professor of physics and biology at Yeshiva University. He received a B.A. and M.A. in natural sciences (physical) from Cambridge University and a Ph.D. in physics from MIT. He was awarded grants from the National Science Foundation to support his research on the self-assembly of globular proteins. His articles have appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Physical Review Letters, and Crystal Growth and Design. In addition to his scientific publications, Neer has authored a novel and several short plays. You can find his previous Story Collider story here.
Deborah Berebichez is the Chief Data Scientist at Metis, a Ph.D. physicist and a Discovery Channel TV host. She is the first Mexican woman to graduate with a physics Ph.D. from Stanford University. Dr. Berebichez is the co-host of Discovery Channel’s Outrageous Acts of Science TV show (2012 – present) where she uses her physics background to explain the science behind extraordinary engineering feats. She also appears as an expert on the Travel Chanel, NOVA, CNN, FOX, MSNBC and numerous international media outlets. Deborah’s passion is to empower young people to learn science and to improve the state of STEM education in the world and her work in science outreach has been widely recognized. She is a John C. Whitehead Fellow at the Foreign Policy Association and a recipient of the Top Latina Tech Blogger award by the Association of Latinos in Social Media LATISM. Currently at Metis she leads the creation and growth of exceptional data science training opportunities. You can find Deborah's previous Story Collider story here.
This story originally aired July 28, 2017.
Story Transcript
Deborah: So I grew up in Mexico City in a community that was fairly conservative and discouraged women from pursuing a career in science. I was very much in love with physics and math, and I wanted to discover the laws of the universe and how things worked. My mom told me at a very young age to not tell anybody in school that I liked math and physics because, probably, I would never be able to get married, and that nearly happened.
But I learned to hide my love for physics. So my advisers in school were no better and they told me the same thing. So when it came time to apply to college, I applied for philosophy because I thought, Oh, I could ask all the questions that I want to know and find out about the world.
So I started to study philosophy for two years, but we have a French educational system in Mexico where you cannot study other subjects simultaneously. So after two years, I decided to burst out and I said, “No, I wanna study physics.” So I applied behind everyone’s back. Just like, you know, a lot of kids do crazy stuff when they're teenagers, I was like reading books about Tycho Brahe and Isaac Newton and really cool stuff, but I had to hide it.
So I applied to a school and finally I got a wonderful scholarship and I couldn’t say no to that. So I went to Brandeis University, which is a small school in Massachusetts. I met a mentor from India, a wonderful grad student who allowed me to skip the first two years of the physics major so that I could cram everything in a summer and be able to finish in the time that I had the scholarship, which was two years. [Ed note: See Deborah's original Story Collider story.]
I finished that and then my family wanted me to come back to Mexico so that, again, they would be able to tell me that I would not be able to get married having done that. I was just too hungry for knowledge and to continue to pursue my doctorate in physics. So I went to look for places and schools around Boston and I ended up visiting MIT. That’s where I met this really nice geeky guy.
Neer: Yes, that’s me. And I was, at the time, the senior graduate student in the lab and one of your many duties as the senior graduate student in the lab is to show prospective students around the lab and make them feel that it’s the best place in the world. Actually, for me, it was. I was a lucky person there. So I didn’t need to do too much convincing and I showed Deborah all the great equipment we had. It was a laser lab. We were doing laser light sky. Yes, I know. It really was a laser. That’s not a euphemism. It was a laser. But I did, of course, keep a sort of distant professional tone because I thought, Well, what if she does arrive? I don't want anything weird to happen. So I was very formal with her, I think.
Deborah: So at the time, I decided I’m going to go back to Mexico City for a while, be with my family and then I’m going to do a masters in physics there. I wasn’t ready to pursue my PhD. Then a year and a half later, we kept in touch and I got accepted, but I got accepted on the West Coast to Stanford. And I went to MIT because I was about to hear from them, and I did get accepted there. I went back that summer to see if we could hang out and I could decide between both options.
Neer: At that point, I had already graduated. I had my PhD so I didn’t need to be professional anymore. And yeah, we made out, basically. We were together for a month.
Deborah: As far as physicists can make out, if you know what I mean.
Neer: Ouch
Deborah: So it was a pretty innocent relationship. I thought he was brilliant but…
Neer: He still is.
Deborah: But husband material? Maybe not so much. So I decided… well, actually you were pretty selfless because you said…
Neer: Yeah, I know. There's a statue commemorating the event somewhere in MIT. Because I told Deborah you have MIT on one hand and you have Stanford, and actually the person behind the offer at Stanford was Steve Chu. You may have heard of him. He won a Nobel Prize then and also became, eventually, Secretary of Energy for President Obama, so a big deal.
I said, “You know, you should go to Stanford. I know that it means long distance for us, but it’s the better place for you.”
Deborah: Amazing. So I ended up going to Stanford and working with Steve Chu. And our relationship didn’t really last. It was all my fault.
Neer: You know your relationship is in trouble when your girlfriend tells you not to visit her for Thanksgiving.
Deborah: I was just overwhelmed. I mean, a physics PhD for somebody who had like two, three years before not remembering algebra. Like a plus b, all that squared. I didn’t even remember that. And I was here with the crème de la crème, with all the wizards that had won Mathematics Olympics. I just couldn’t focus on men.
Neer: No, you had to focus on one man. It’s just the word “men,” it’s just…
Deborah: Yeah, you mean Isaac Newton.
Neer: Technically, you also have to focus on Albert Einstein because relativity is examined in part of the qualifying exams in Stanford. At least they did at MIT.
Deborah: I probably failed that part.
So I ended up pursuing my degree there. And I was depressed and struggling. It was just a really hard time. But I did end up going to the American Physical Society, which is a very large conference with thousands of physicists, and I ended up going to his talk.
Neer: Yes. So we had broken up because, eventually, when your girlfriend doesn’t want to see you, it’s hard to maintain the relationship. But I broke up [with her] after the qualifying exams.
Deborah: He was a saint.
Neer: I did it the proper way.
So then I am at this premier conference for physics in the United States and about to give a talk. Of course, I’m all in my head getting ready with the talk, and who comes in? Deborah. I’m like, Ah, just what I needed. My ex.
But I still managed somehow. I don't know how, I kept it together. I gave a talk and then we talked after that.
Deborah: Well, you actually kissed me.
Neer: I did. I kissed you. But that’s my way of communicating physics when I’m really excited. We did kiss, but we did not get back together, which is…
Deborah: Yeah, that was it. I kind of wanted to, but it was confusing and I went back to Stanford and long distance just didn’t work out for us. So thirteen years went by.
Neer: Thirteen years, people.
Deborah: Then a sad thing happened in my family. My dad passed away all of a sudden in Mexico City. It was really tragic because we’re three daughters and I’m the oldest, and both my younger sisters were married and with kids already. After all, I was like the black sheep in the family.
So I went back to Mexico and I was just destroyed. And my sister told me, “You know what? We have to sell that home. And you're the only one who‘s kept all that stuff, all the memories and letters and stuff from when you were growing up because you haven't really moved out. So I have room to keep ten boxes for you. That’s it. That’s all I have in my house. So you better clean out your room and just pack what you need.”
So I started to clean out my room. It took me a whole month. Then I found Neer’s letters from thirteen years before. And poems and funny pictures that you all geeky people out there would really love. Like just getting into the hallways at MIT and classrooms that you can only get by borrowing some important person’s key and taking funny pictures with writing on the board like, “Nudity is sinful.” All kinds of like crazy, geeky stuff.
I was like, Wow, he was such a terrific guy. So nice and so ready to get married. So probably, very likely he's married and with kids by now. Oh, how sad. I was miserably single at the time.
So I just packed everything in a folder and kept it, and I said, “One day, I'll write a book, a novel about this crazy affair between two physicists.” So I put it there and after thirteen years of not hearing from him or Googling him or anything, I moved back to New York.
Neer: And what happened is I actually, by a strange coincidence, was single at the time and never married, no children. True. And I actually had been single for about twenty minutes. My friends said to me, “Look, you gotta do something about this. Why don’t you go online?” Until then, I was very skeptical of online dating. I didn’t think it was the way to go. And they worked on me and pushed hard, really put a lot of pressure on me.
Deborah: They worked on you. You should have seen the pictures on his profile. He looked like a pedophile.
Neer: So I got a profile up on Match. Some of you may know how Match works. After you're up and running, you start getting matches. I got twelve. They're like eggs. They send you twelve of them. I’m looking at them and I’m thinking, I paid eighty-five dollars for this? They can’t even spell!
So I was very disappointed. It was late at night. It was around midnight. Just then, my sister, who happened to live one floor below me, said… (She was in the room, though. This is not through the apartment.) She said, “You don’t have to just accept Matches. Why don’t you search for some things?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, search by some criterion that’s important to you.”
I said, “Well, you know, I'd really like to meet a woman who speaks more than one language. That’s very important for me.”
So I did a search on Spanish, Italian, and Hebrew, and the first person to come up with a ninety-eight percent match was ScienceGirl13, who was not using her real name, but I recognized her by her picture because she looked exactly the same after thirteen years.
Deborah: I thought you said I had improved?
Neer: Yeah. Maybe I did. Maybe I did.
Anyway, so now I had not written, been in touch with her for thirteen years because I was the kind of “the past is the past and you move on to greener pastures,” and here I’m back at the same pasture. I thought about it, but I said, You know, it’s been so long. What the heck.
I wrote her a long and, if I may say so, beautiful email in Spanish. Because I had learned Spanish for her. Deborah didn’t know this. I learned Spanish because… Well, basically saying maybe we can meet again. Then I, boom, sent it.
Deborah: Well, first of all, you said to me that you learned Spanish because you didn’t want people to think that you had only started to learn it for a woman. So you continued with it for your own sake.
Neer: So this is a public forum. But let’s get this straight. So what happened was I started learning it for you then we broke up in second-semester Spanish, and it’s just terrible to drop a class mid-semester. It looks very bad. Even though I was just taking it as a listener, it’s just not good, so then I continued.
After that, I said, Look, if I drop it now, people will think, “oh, he just learned Spanish for a woman. He wasn’t really into Spanish.” So I did three more semesters.
Deborah: So here I am receiving this amazing email, but I freaked out because I had just been back from Mexico and, three months before, I had gone through this really difficult time in my life and I receive this email. He was… I don't know. It confused me.
So I write back just one sentence like, “Wow, this is weird. I recently reread your letters. Like, are you in New York?”
Neer: After thirteen years, “Wow, this is weird.”
So that was not what I was expecting. In fact, I was almost about to not reply because there was not even a Dear Neer or a hello. Hello would have been nice. But I did notice one thing. Somehow, I have this habit of checking the time at which people send me emails and I notice that she had sent it to me twenty minutes after I had sent it to her. So somewhere around 12:30 a.m., and I realized…
Deborah: So you knew I was desperate.
Neer: Absolutely. I got a chance.
So then what I did is I said, Okay, if this is the game we’re playing, I'll write back in English. And I said, “Yes, hello, Deborah. I do live in New York and I hope you enjoyed rereading the letters. Would you like to meet for coffee and tea? Because coffee and tea is over in twenty minutes, and if things don’t work out and we’re strangers, we can move on with our lives.”
Deborah: While honoring my Mexican-Lithuanian heritage, I wrote back saying, “After thirteen years coffee or tea? I'd rather do vodka or tequila.”
Neer: So I said, “Well, if you're going to raise me drinks, I re-raise you dinner. And let’s go out to dinner,” which we did.
Deborah: So we met for dinner. March…
Neer: 28th. March 28th.
Deborah: It was an amazing dinner. My legs were shaking. It was weird, again.
And then I had a great memory. I remember a lot of…
Neer: You just forgot the date we met. Your memory was okay. You remembered portions of my life.
Deborah: You remembered everything.
Neer: I did. Somehow I remembered… you had had a birthday. We met in March and your birthday was February 13, and that surprised you that I remembered your birthday.
Then you said, “Well, yes. And I remember yours, April 25th,” and I said, “Close. December 29th.”
But that’s when I knew I had the upper hand and that’s why I kissed her in the elevator on the way down. And we've been…
Deborah: And then I knew this was it for me. I was like head over heels right that moment.
Neer: And a year and a half later, we got married.
Deborah: We got married and we had this amazing wedding. The backdrop of our ceremony was an image taken of a galaxy by the Hubble Telescope. We had this really cool physics wedding. Everything around there was physics.
Neer: There was a robot.
Deborah: A few months ago, our first daughter was born. And we like to perform a lot of physics experiments on her.
Neer: We do.
Deborah: Not a lot of them she likes.
Neer: No, but she's a good sport.
Deborah: Yes. So I think…
Neer: Well, I know that you're always going to be my second love after physics.
Deborah: It’s going to be the same for me.
Neer: I know.
Deborah: But you know what?
Neer: What?
Deborah: I’m thinking about the wedding and I know you owe me a kiss in public, because you didn’t give me one at our wedding even though we planned for it.
Neer: That is true. I got nervous and forgot to kiss the bride.