Kurt Gottfried, a theoretical physicist who barely escaped the brutal actuality of 1 world warfare and devoted his profession to stopping one other as a co-founder of the influential Union of Involved Scientists, died on Aug. 25 in Ithaca, N.Y. He was 93.
His loss of life, in a nursing house the place he and his spouse had been dwelling for the final 10 years, was confirmed by his son, David. Dr. Gottfried taught at Cornell College, in Ithaca, for 35 years.
Dr. Gottfried, who fled Nazi-controlled Austria when he was 9, grew to become an outspoken opponent of nuclear weaponry, a champion of politically dissident scientists within the Soviet Union and South America, and a fierce critic of the George W. Bush administration’s environmental coverage, which he stated was grounded in analysis skewed to comport with the White Home’s political agenda.
He and the physicist Henry Approach Kendall, his former roommate on the Massachusetts Institute of Know-how and a future Nobel laureate, based the Union of Concerned Scientists in 1969. A nonpartisan group, it lobbies to shift the nation’s analysis priorities from navy know-how to “the answer of urgent environmental and social issues.”
Dr. Gottfried stated on the time that the world was present process a transformative revolution pushed by “the relentless exploitation of scientific information.”
“That many of those transformations have been immeasurably useful goes with out saying,” he stated. “However, as with all revolutions, the technological revolution has launched harmful forces, and our society has failed to deal with them.”
In 1999, 30 years after he helped discovered the group, Dr. Gottfried grew to become its chairman. He served in that place till 2009.
In 2017, he informed MIT Technology Review that his position in creating the group “was rather more necessary than any of the science I’ve carried out.”
He rallied fellow scientists within the early Eighties to assist derail the Reagan administration’s proposed Strategic Protection Initiative, the bold missile protection system that grew to become mocked as a “Star Wars” protect.
They argued that the initiative could be technologically futile, and that pursuit of space-based weapons amounted to an abandonment of the coverage of mutually assured destruction, which till then had prevented nuclear battle.
In an opinion essay in The New York Occasions, Dr. Gottfried and Hans Bethe, a fellow professor at Cornell, warned that the event of antisatellite weapons “comes near a declaration of warfare on the Soviet Union.”
In 1983, he and a bunch of scientists, retired navy officers and United States senators pressed Washington to open negotiations with the Soviet Union on a treaty that will go properly past the vaguely worded 1967 settlement to ban the testing and use of weapons, each nuclear and standard, in outer house.
His concern about nuclear energy run amok was pushed partially by his affiliation with a few of the very scientists who had devised atomic bombs throughout and after World Conflict II, and who subsequently grew to become alarmed on the weapons’ harmful potential.
Amongst them have been Victor Weisskopf, Dr. Gottfried’s thesis adviser at M.I.T.; the Nobel laureate Niels Bohr, with whom Dr. Gottfried studied in Copenhagen in 1959; and Professor Bethe.
He additionally joined a whole bunch of American scientists who pledged to curtail cooperative ventures with the Soviet Union in protest of its imprisonment of dissidents.
Public and political strain contributed to the discharge in 1986 of the Soviet physicist Yuri Orlov, who had been jailed for a decade after forming the Moscow Helsinki Watch Group to observe the Soviet authorities’s compliance with the human rights provisions of the 1975 Helsinki Accords. After his launch, Professor Orlov joined the physics college at Cornell.
Dr. Gottfried additionally helped free and recruit the physicist Elena Sevilla, who had been imprisoned in Argentina due to the political actions of her husband, a newspaper reporter. On her launch in 1978, she went to Cornell to finish her graduate research.
In 2004, complaining that the Bush administration was distorting scientific information, significantly about local weather change, Dr. Gottfried inspired the Union of Involved Scientists to ascertain a program for scientific integrity, which efficiently pressured the federal authorities to strengthen pointers for analysis.
Kurt Gottfried was born on Could 17, 1929, in Vienna. His father, Solomon, was a chemist however was barred by antisemitic legal guidelines from educating or conducting analysis; as a substitute, he ran a manufacturing facility that made ski gear, bicycles and ice skates.
His mom, Augusta, who, like his father, had a doctorate in chemistry, handed for Aryan and was capable of organize to flee with the household in 1938 after their house was invaded on Kristallnacht.
They traveled by means of Germany to Belgium. Kurt attended college there for six months whereas the household awaited paperwork to to migrate to Montreal, the place they resumed their manufacturing enterprise.
Kurt studied engineering at McGill College in Montreal and may need joined his father’s enterprise had considered one of his professors, John David Jackson, not recognized his potential and lured him into pursuing physics as a substitute. After graduating from McGill, he earned a doctorate in theoretical physics in 1955 from M.I.T., the place his thesis adviser was Professor Weisskopf.
Dr. Gottfried was employed as an affiliate professor at Cornell in 1964. He was thought of a mentor to a era of distinguished scientists and authorities officers there. He was named a professor emeritus in 1998.
He additionally served on the senior employees of the European Heart for Nuclear Analysis in Geneva.
“Kurt Gottfried’s necessary legacies included his college students and the colleagues he impressed,” stated Richard L. Garwin, a fellow physicist and fellow critic of the Strategic Protection Initiative. “Additionally, an necessary legacy is the 1988 ebook that Kurt co-edited with Bruce Blair of Yale, ‘Disaster, Stability and Nuclear Conflict.’”
Dr. Gottfried additionally helped edit “The Fallacy of Star Wars” (1984) and “Reforging European Safety: From Confrontation to Cooperation” (1990). In 1966, he revealed a extremely regarded textbook, “Quantum Mechanics: Fundamentals.”
Dr. Gottfried married Sorel Dickstein in 1955. She grew to become his unofficial editor and adviser. She died in 2021. Along with his son, he’s survived by a daughter, Laura Gottfried; a sister, Ilse Matalon; and 4 grandchildren.