A Symposium on the Nature of Science

PHYSICS RESEARCH: SEARCH FOR GOD

Timothy E. Toohig
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Physicists as varied as Galileo, Newton, Einstein and Bohr have testified to an encounter with the transcendent motivating their search. Each physicist interprets that experience of "something beyond" from the context of his/her own faith experience.

Timothy E. Toohig
Research Professor of Physics
Boston College

Dr. Timothy E. Toohig is the DOE/NSF Program Manager for the U.S. involvement in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. In this capacity Dr. Toohig oversees the U.S. participation in the two large detectors and the accelerator, a $531 million project. He is also the DOE monitor for the Stanford Linear Collider Center (SLAC) at Stanford University. Prior to this activity with the Department of Energy he was Deputy Associate Director, Conventional Construction Division of the Superconducting Super Collider Laboratory in Texas from 1989 until the project ended in 1994. Dr. Toohig had been associated with the SSC since it was first conceived in 1983, first in design studies at Fermilab, and, from 1984 to 1989, as Deputy Head of the Conventional Facilities Division for the URA Central Design Group which established the design parameters and cost estimates for the facility, and provided support for the DOE site selection process. He has been Deputy Associate Director for the SSCL Conventional Construction Division since movement of the project to Texas in 1989, except for a short period as Construction Coordinator in the Project Management Office. The Conventional Construction Division is responsible for developing, with the responsible technical divisions, the design requirements for all of the conventional facilities to house, power, cool, shield and transport the equipment and personnel constituting the Laboratory, and to oversee the A-E/CM contractor in the execution of those design requirements in construction of the facilities. Physics credits include discovery of the eta meson, measurement of the pion and kaon form factors, bending of high energy particle beams by crystals, and channeling radiation.

Dr. Toohig holds a Bachelor's degree in Physics from Boston College, a Master's degree in Optics from the University of Rochester, and a Doctorate in Physics from The Johns Hopkins University.

Prior to his association with the SSC, Dr. Toohig was responsible for the conventional construction for the Tevatron project at Fermilab. He was responsible for the design and construction of the Neutrino experimental area during the initial construction of Fermilab. Earlier he had been responsible for the beam transport and targetting for the first slow extracted proton beam from the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron at the Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Dr. Toohig was a member of the Johns Hopkins team that discovered the eta meson, one of the elementary constituents of matter in experiments at the Berkeley Bevatron. He also participated with a Soviet-American team in a series of experiments at Fermilab on analyzing basic parameters of the * and K mesons. Subsequently, he led the American effort in a series of joint experiments on the Soviet accelerators at Dubna and Serpukhov in the Soviet Union studying the channeling of high energy particles in passing through crystals.

Dr. Toohig is also a Jesuit priest. He was ordained to the priesthood in 1965. From 1994 until 1996 he was a Visiting Fellow at the Jesuit Institute at Boston College researching the connections between physics research and the search for God. He was Rector of the Jesuit Community at Fairfield Community in Connecticut in 1996-1997.


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