David Bodansky
1924-2012
Today’s Seattle Times contains a three-inch column, paid obit of David
Bodansky, a former Chair and long-time Professor of Physics at UW, who
died at 88 earlier this month. I knew him slightly, but greatly
respected what I knew: he was a wise and very decent man, deserving of
far more to be remembered than by those three inches. As I hope he
will be.
Bodansky, and his generation, only half a decade older than I, were
separated by the watershed of his adulthood in the early postwar physics of the nuclear age, when hope ran high that our awful nuclear weapons might somehow be tamed into useful service. Long after I, and most of us younger than I, gave up on nuclear power, moving on for many reasons to solar and wind and conservation and efficiencies and renewables and the perhaps too-fond dream of sustainability, Bodansky and many good men of his generation held on to nuclear hopes.
Perhaps we too will be disappointed, in our turn.
Halstead Harrison
Prof Emeritus, Atmospheric Sciences
University of Washington
Dec. 9th, 2012