Samuel Goudsmit
Samuel Goudsmit around 1928
Samuel Abraham Goudsmit
(1902-07-11)July 11, 1902
December 4, 1978(1978-12-04) (aged 76)
Dutch-American
University of Leiden (Ph.D) (1927)
Electron spin
Operation Alsos
National Medal of Science (1976)
Robert Bacher
Samuel Abraham Goudsmit (July 11, 1902 – December 4, 1978) was a Dutch-American physicist famous for jointly proposing the concept of electron spin with George Eugene Uhlenbeck in 1925.[1][2]
Goudsmit was born in The Hague, Netherlands, of Dutch Jewish descent. He was the son of Isaac Goudsmit, a manufacturer of water-closets, and Marianne Goudsmit-Gompers, who ran a millinery shop. In 1943 his parents were deported to a concentration camp by the German occupiers of the Netherlands and were murdered there.[3]
Visualization of electron spin on a wall in Leiden
Goudsmit studied physics at the University of Leiden under Paul Ehrenfest,[4] where he obtained his PhD in 1927.[5] After receiving his PhD, Goudsmit served as a Professor at the University of Michigan between 1927 and 1946. In 1930 he co-authored a text with Linus Pauling titled The Structure of Line Spectra.
During World War II he worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[6] He was also the scientific head of the Alsos Mission and successfully reached the German group of nuclear physicists around Werner Heisenberg and Otto Hahn at Hechingen (then French zone) in advance of the French physicist Yves Rocard, who had previously succeeded in recruiting German scientists to come to France.
Alsos Members
Alsos, part of the Manhattan Project, was designed to assess the progress of the Nazi atomic bomb project. In the book Alsos, published in 1947, Goudsmit concludes that the Germans did not get close to creating a weapon. He attributed this to the inability of science to function under a totalitarian state and the German scientists' lack of understanding how to make an atomic bomb. Both of these conclusions have been disputed by later historians (see Heisenberg) and contradicted by the fact that the totalitarian Soviet state produced the bomb shortly after the book's release[7].
Samuel Goudsmit and Wolfgang Pauli in Uruguay, 1942, Rio Negro Hydro site works, when the nazis german engineers were deported
After the war he was briefly a professor at Northwestern University, and from 1948-1970 was a senior scientist at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, chairing the Physics Department 1952-1960. He meanwhile became well known as the Editor-in-chief of the leading physics journal Physical Review, published by the American Physical Society. In July 1958 he started the journal Physical Review Letters.[8] On his retirement as editor in 1974, Goudsmit moved to the faculty of the University of Nevada in Reno, where he remained until his death four years later.
He also made some scholarly contributions to Egyptology published in Expedition, Summer 1972, pp. 13–16 ; American Journal of Archaeology 78, 1974 p. 78; and Journal of Near Eastern Studies 40, 1981 pp. 43–46. The Samuel A. Goudsmit Collection of Egyptian Antiquities resides at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan.[9]
Goudsmit became a corresponding member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1939, though he resigned the next year. He was readmitted in 1950.[10]
Works[edit]
Goudsmit, Samuel A. (1947). Alsos. eBook published by Plunkett Lake Press in 2017. ASIN B075WCCQBN
Goudsmit, Samuel A.; Claiborne, Robert (1966). Time. Time-Life Science Library.
Goudsmit, S.; Saunderson, J. L. (1940). "Multiple Scattering of Electrons". Phys. Rev. 57: 24. Bibcode:1940PhRv...57...24G. doi:10.1103/physrev.57.24.
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^ G.E. Uhlenbeck and S. Goudsmit, Naturwissenschaften 13(47) (1925) 953.
^ Goldhaber, Maurice (April 1979). "Obituary: Samuel A. Goudsmit". Physics Today. 32 (4): 71–72. Bibcode:1979PhT....32d..71G. doi:10.1063/1.2995511. Archived from the original on 2013-09-27.
^ Benjamin Bederson, 2008, Samuel Abraham Goudsmit 1902 — 1978, Biographical Memoir, National Academy of Sciences, Washington DC, 29 pp
^ Samuel Goudsmit at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
^ Samuel Goudsmit (1927). "Atoommodel en structuur der spectra" (PDF).
^ Asimov. Asimov's Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology (2nd revised ed.).
^ Koeth, Tim (May 2019). "Tracking the journey of a uranium cube". Physics Today. 72 (5): 36. doi:10.1063/PT.3.4202.
^ "Samuel A. Goudsmit Papers, 1921-1979". Archived from the original on October 31, 2014. Retrieved October 31, 2014.
^ Description of Goudsmit's contribution to the museum
^ "S.A. Goudsmit (1902 - 1978)". Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved 24 January 2016.
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Samuel Abraham Goudsmit.
Wikiquote has quotations related to: Samuel Goudsmit
Annotated Bibliography for Samuel Abraham Goudsmit from the Alsos Digital Library for Nuclear Issues
Goudsmit on the discovery of electron spin
A collection of digitized materials related to Goudsmit's and Linus Pauling's structural chemistry research.
National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoir
BPN: 80519974
SNAC: w6sq91sb
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Dutch physicists
Manhattan Project people
Members of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences
National Medal of Science laureates
Brookhaven National Laboratory staff
Guggenheim Fellows
Leiden University alumni
University of Michigan faculty
American people of Dutch-Jewish descent
Dutch emigrants to the United States
Dutch Jews
Jewish American scientists
Jewish physicists
People from The Hague
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