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Eric Beth, retired physics professor
A memorial Mass for Eric W. Beth, assistant professor emeritus of physics, will be offered at 11 a.m. tomorrow in St. Joseph-University Catholic Church, 3269 Main St.
Beth died unexpectedly Saturday in his Buffalo home. He was 93.
Born in Vienna, Austria, Beth lived in a number of countries as a child, including Sweden, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Holland and Czechoslovakia. He studied physics at the University of Vienna, where he earned a bachelor's degree in 1931 and a doctorate in 1934. He also did postdoctoral work at universities throughout Europe, including Cambridge University.
Beth and his family fled to the United States from Vienna at the time of the Nazi occupation. In the U.S., he did postdoctoral work and taught at the University of California-Berkeley, Reed College in Oregon and the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.
He served in the Army during World War II, teaching reservists at Northwestern University. After the war, Beth worked as a physicist at the Air Force Cambridge Research Center from 1946-53, and then as a physicist at the Union Switch and Signal Division of Westinghouse Air Brake Co. in Pennsylvania.
He joined the UB faculty in 1962, serving as an assistant professor of physics until his retirement in the early 1980s.
Worries about the moon landing of Apollo 11 in 1969 prompted Beth to spend $1,500 of his own money to send telegrams to all 435 members of the U.S. House of Representatives and 100 members of the Senate urging Congress to prevent the landing "while still possible," according to a story in the July 25, 1969, edition of the Buffalo Evening News. Beth was concerned that the return to Earth of the Apollo spaceship would bring deadly microbes-either those indigenous to the moon or those that had been transported from the Earth by earlier Apollo trips but had mutated on the moon. The News article noted that NASA had replied to Beth that everything possible was being done to "preclude such contamination."
In his later years, Beth was a frequent customer at The Steer restaurant on Main Street.