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Fieldston and felt the aura of the renowned physicist J. Robert Oppen-
heimer, who had attended the same school about 30 years earlier. Socolow,
like Oppenheimer, chose Harvard for college.
Entering Harvard in 1955, Socolow intended to major in chemistry.
Parental encouragement and his own inclinations (“I had a strong belief
that I should learn everything. . . . I thought I could try to learn all the ideas
taught at Harvard!”) led him to select a broad range of courses along with
science classes. Among the most memorable were a survey of the fine arts
and a poetry class taught by Archibald MacLeish. Socolow also took a
remarkable course in the Russian language taught outside the university.
Already conversant in French, which he had studied in high school and
during a summer spent with a French family, Socolow became comfortable
with Russian as well.
In 1957, Socolow was invited to work as a summer student at the
Brookhaven National Laboratory, where groundbreaking work in physics
was being done. “I lived on site, breathed the excitement of physics. I
changed my major from chemistry to physics upon returning to Harvard
[and] I decided I wanted to participate in the discovery of the laws of fun-
damental particles. . . . It was a fascination.”
Graduating summa cum laude in 1959 with a B.A. in physics, Socolow
was awarded Harvard's Sheldon Travel Fellowship. It enabled him to travel
for a full year through Russia, Asia, and Africa, returning via the Middle
East. “My agenda was to be a sponge,” he says. The journey left him with
thousands of lasting impressions, particularly regarding the effects of colo-
nialism and the strength of nationalism at that time. While traveling,
Socolow read a topic in which Albert Schweitzer described his decision to
spend his twenties pursuing music and philosophy and to delay answering
the call he felt to devote himself to social and medical problems.“I needed
permission from myself to stay in physics, and here it was,” Socolow recalls.
He returned to Harvard in 1960 for graduate studies, and he completed a
Ph.D. thesis in theoretical high-energy physics under a young professor,
Sidney Coleman.
In August of 1961, after a summer spent working on arms control issues
at RAND in California, Socolow was an aide at a Pugwash Conference
held in Stowe, Vermont. Pugwash Conferences, inspired by a 1955 mani-
festo of Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein and named for the site in
Nova Scotia where they were first held, bring together scientists to discuss
controversial issues of global importance, such as nuclear disarmament.
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