Physicist William Shurcliff; Advocated for Public Interest

William A. Shurcliff, 97, a physicist who became a key crusader against the supersonic jet and an advocate for solar-energy research, died June 20 at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, Mass. He had pneumonia.

Born into a science-savvy and activist family, Dr. Shurcliff distinguished himself in government, private industry and academia.

He co-edited an official history of the Manhattan Project during World War II and also documented the atomic bomb tests on Bikini Atoll in 1946. He spent many years as a senior researcher at the Cambridge Electron Accelerator, a high-energy physics laboratory run by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In 1967, while at the Cambridge lab, he began Citizens League Against the Sonic Boom, a scientific clearinghouse that opposed the U.S. government's development of supersonic transit.

Allied with Sen. William Proxmire (D-Wis.) and environmentalists such as David Brower, he faced a strong lobby of military and aerospace interests that had invested hundreds of millions of dollars in studying the prospects of supersonic transit flights that would travel at up to 1,800 mph.

With impeccable credibility, a gentle disposition and a succinct way with words, Dr. Shurcliff challenged in his many writings and presentations the validity of government and scientific reports that seemed to play down the noise nuisance and dollar damage caused by the supersonic craft.

He highlighted the "bang zone" of the jets -- the shock waves that would roll out like a carpet for up to 50 miles for the entire path of the plane's travel. He said the sonic boom of 150 planes in flight could result in $1 million in broken windows and cracked plaster on the ground. Many people would be startled night and day by the "sonic pollution," he said.

He was credited with helping to end the development of American supersonic jets and to limit supersonic flights from Europe to New York and Washington. Eventually, the planes became economically unviable, and commercial flights were suspended in recent years.

William Asahel Shurcliff was born March 27, 1909, in Boston. His father was a landscape architect, and his mother was a founder of a state civil liberties group that, among other activities, protested the execution of Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.

As a young man, Dr. Shurcliff followed his parents' interest in carpentry and built a series of kayaks. In a nod to his growing interest in science, he named the boats after atomic particles. His double kayak was the Deuteron.

He was a 1930 graduate of Harvard, from which he also received a doctorate in physics in 1934. He then spent several years with a division of American Cyanamid, where he helped create the original formula for military camouflage paint.

Dr. Shurcliff came to Washington during World War II and worked primarily for the Office of Scientific Research and Development, a research funding organization that played a role in the Allied development of the atomic bomb.