|
| Home About the Fellowship About Tim Toohig Links LARP |
Timothy Toohig was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1928. He received his doctorate in physics from Johns Hopkins University in 1962 and was ordained into the priesthood in 1965 at Boston College. He worked at Brookhaven National Laboratory from 1965 to 1970, was a staff member at Fermilab starting in 1970, joining the SSC laboratory in 1988. When he died suddenly in September 2001 he was the Department of Energy Program Manager for the U.S. contributions to the Large Hadron Collider project at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.
As much in science as in faith, Tim dedicated his life to opening lines of communication between people of different countries and religions. At the height of the Cold War, he participated in accelerator experiments in the Soviet Union. He strongly encouraged U.S. participation in the LHC, and in his last assignment at the U.S. Department of Energy he conceived the idea that the U.S. accelerator community should form an ongoing collaboration on the LHC accelerator, even after the completion of the construction project. This concept is at the core of the LARP collaboration. "Father Tim" to his extended family throughout the high-energy physics community, Toohig saw no conflict between his pursuit of scientific and spiritual knowledge. While serving at the Department of Energy, he also held a research position at Boston College. He was, in fact, representative of the Jesuit outlook since the order's founding in 1540 by Ignatius Loyola, who considered the acquisition of knowledge a spiritual task. Some of Toohig's scientific papers are featured in an exhibit, "Jesuits and the Sciences," compiled by the Science Library of Loyola University of Chicago, and available at http://libraries.luc.edu/about/exhibits/jesuits/
During his discussion, he reached back to the early 1960s, when he was a graduate student at Johns Hopkins. He was in a group working on the Berkeley Bevatron experiment that discovered the eta meson, a critical step on the path toward establishing the existence of quarks. Toohig and his fellow grad students ran their data during the night shift at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, watching those old line printers crank out the results of their calculations. With each result they knew they were seeing something new. "It was a fantastic feeling, better than winning a football game," he recalled. "I couldn't help relating it to experiences in prayer, to the very special moments I'm sure we all have had in our lives, times of real trouble or very special moments when there's this tremendous sense of interior joy and excitement. It could only be described as a deep spiritual experience. With time, I've learned that such experiences are really what physics research is all about, and that's why we do it. The reward is that joy." |
  |
| LARP is a U.S. DOE program, and is an equal opportunity employer |
Physicist Tim Toohig/Father Timothy Toohig, S.J. played leading roles in establishing the scientific and humanitarian standards at all his places of work. He made indispensable contributions to the design and construction of the Tevatron accelerator at Fermilab, then brought his scientific and leadership skills and immense enthusiasm to the Superconducting Super Collider project. Throughout a career spanning four decades, his spiritual guidance was as valued as much as his scientific knowledge. In May 2000 Toohig presided at memorial services at Fermilab for founding Director Robert R. Wilson, who had once described Toohig as "spiritual counselor for the project" of building the laboratory.
In his March, 2000 presentation at Fermilab ("Physics Research: Searching for God") at the Symposium on the Nature of Science, Toohig noted these parallels: "Both religion and science contain a powerful sense that there is more there than we currently understand. In science, this is what leads us, for example, to build new accelerators, as a way to reach beyond what we know, toward discoveries that we believe lie beyond."