If love is supposed to be ephemeral, elusive and maybe also undiscovered by its experimenters, then the wedding of Ruth Bushnell Toner and Simon David Fiorucci may have hit love at its source. After all, the couple met while looking for dark matter, one of the most ephemeral and elusive (and in fact, undiscovered) phenomena in physics.
“We believe the galaxy Simon Fiorucci depends on dark matter,” said Richard Gaitskell, Mr. Fiorucci’s boss in a consortium of university research labs looking for evidence of the phenomenon. “But it is like marriage: We are doing it now on blind faith, and yet it may well be the most important thing we can know about the universe.” …
They continued their studies and work, but saw each other on all vacations and figured out ways to meet, either in England (she was studying at Cambridge University) or in the United States (he was at Brown). After five years of dating this way, the turning point came this year. It was, as she said, “unromantic.”
…They now live in a house in Attleboro, Mass., halfway between where Mr. Fiorucci still delves into dark matter at Brown and where Ms. Toner is just starting her postdoctoral work at Harvard, having moved on to neutrinos, a somewhat more well-established phenomenon in physics.
“They are both cutting-edge physicists,” said Jeremy Chapman, one of Mr. Fiorucci’s colleagues at Brown. “They are so smart that, really, they can talk about things together that few people would even understand. I say that’s perfect.”
Harvard physicist Lisa Randall is the author “Knocking on Heaven’s Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World.” This entry was posted in Uncategorized by Tinker Ready. Bookmark the permalink.