Obituary of Harry Soodak

Born in New York City on 24 December 1920, Harry Soodak received his Bachelor’s degree from the City College of New York in February 1940, a Master’s degree from Columbia University, and his Ph.D. from Duke in 1944. After being associated with the Manhattan Project at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (working on the physics of nuclear reactors) he served as a Research Associate at MIT for nearly three years. In 1949 Soodak joined the Physics Department of his alma mater, CCNY. He retired in 1992.

At Oak Ridge Soodak gave courses in nuclear physics and reactor theory According to Oak Ridge Director Alvin M. Weinberg, these courses were “phenomenally successful” and Soodak had the reputation in the AEC of being “one of the clearest lecturers in the business.” In 1945 Harry Soodak and Eugene Wigner published the first design of a sodium-cooled breeder reactor. The book Elementary Pile Theory, by Soodak and Edward C. Campbell, was published by John Wiley in 1950.

Commenting on Soodak’s early work, as well as his continuing contributions to nuclear physics after coming to CCNY – which included lecturing on nuclear theory in the graduate schools of NYU and of Columbia – Mark W. Zemansky, who was then Chairman of the Physics Department at CCNY, wrote in 1958: “During the war, Dr. Soodak made a name for himself in the field of reactor design. Through his theoretical work, in books and articles, and his practical applications, he has become a leading international authority on the design of nuclear reactors. There is hardly a handbook or treatise to which he has not contributed or served in an editorial capacity.”

Those who knew Harry at CCNY as colleagues or as students, can testify that, far from limiting himself to reactor and nuclear physics, he possessed an unmatched understanding of and keen insight into the entire edifice of physics – from Newton to Einstein and from classical to quantum. Well into this decade, he published edifying papers, some of them with one of us (Tiersten).

Without doubt Harry Soodak’s greatest legacy is the decisive influence he had on the hundreds of undergraduate students he taught and advised at CCNY, very much including one the authors of this obituary (Susskind). A physically small “everyman” with a working class New York accent, a big cigar, and an irreverent truthfulness, he taught physics students something entirely new. Most students had no academic family background. Having never met a physicist, to them physics seemed a bloodless subject of long dead historical icons. It was Harry Soodak who turned it into a living, breathing, way of thinking about the world.

He did something they had never seen a teacher do before: when he didn’t know the answer to a question he would take a puff, and then figure it out — at the blackboard, on his feet, in real time. But what impressed them even more was what would happen when he couldn’t figure it out. He’d just say, “I dunno. I gotta think about it after class.” And he would. From Harry they began to understand that modern physics was full of unsolved problems, and that one could actually make a life solving them. When he was presented with an Outstanding Teacher Award in 1987, letters of praise and admiration from former students poured in, filled with gratitude for the great impact that Harry had had on their lives.

Physics was not the only thing that interested Harry. He had an enormous curiosity about the world. He was a proud liberal, whose only religion was social justice. He cared deeply about the dignity of all humans beings. His curiosity and his commitment were infectious. For many of his more than forty years on the faculty Harry Soodak was the heart and soul of the CCNY Physics department. As long as colleagues and students are alive, he will be remembered and cherished.