Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Although serving officially as a driver, Socolow acted also as an unofficial
interpreter for some of the Russian scientists at that meeting, including
Nikolai Bogoliubov and Igor Tamm.
Back at Harvard, Socolow decided that he had to reject a career in arms
control. “One had to become as knowledgeable about weapons as those
who loved them,” he concluded.“I so disliked weapons that I couldn't force
myself to learn about them. Arms control couldn't be my field.”
While in graduate school, Socolow met Elizabeth Sussman, a Vassar
undergraduate. They were married in 1962. Elizabeth became a graduate
student in English at Harvard, where she received a Ph.D. in 1967. In 1964,
Socolow received his Ph.D. and accepted a postdoctoral fellowship from the
National Science Foundation for study at Berkeley and at the European
Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva. At a meeting in
Budapest during his time at CERN he developed a strong bond with a
North Vietnamese physicist.The two of them hoped to contribute to a res-
olution of the growing conflict in Vietnam, but their efforts were
unsuccessful.
Socolow returned to the United States in 1966 as an assistant professor
at Yale University. There he fulfilled an aspiration to teach quantum me-
chanics, and he also continued his antiwar efforts, though with a sense of
futility. He openly supported draft resistance and organized, along with
three other faculty members, Yale's 1969 “Day of Reflection,” a sympo-
sium on scientists and war work. To represent the views of researchers
who worked with the Department of Defense, Socolow invited Marvin
Goldberger of Princeton University. That contact changed the course of
Socolow's career.
Socolow had planned to spend the summer of 1969 in California, work-
ing at the Stanford Linear Accelerator. Goldberger told Socolow and a Yale
colleague, John Harte, about a special summer study run by the National
Academy of Sciences at Stanford that was to examine institutions for the
management of the environment, using a proposed jetport in the Ever-
glades as a case study. Socolow decided to stay away from the Accelerator
for four weeks to participate in the Everglades study as a volunteer.
The National Academy study argued against the construction of the
jetport. It cautioned developers about the importance of water conserva-
tion in the Florida interior to the development of the state's west coast. Not
long after the study was completed, plans for the jetport were abandoned,
and the federal and state governments created the Big Cypress National
