Samuel Abraham Goudsmit
| Samuel Goudsmit | |
|---|---|
|
|
| Born |
July 11, 1902 The Hague, Netherlands |
| Died | December 4, 1978 (aged 76) Reno, Nevada |
| Nationality | Dutch-American |
| Fields | Physics |
| Institutions | University of Michigan |
| Alma mater | University of Leiden (Ph.D) (1927) |
| Doctoral students | Robert Bacher |
| Known for |
Electron spin Operation Alsos |
| Notable awards | National Medal of Science (1976) |
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.
Goudsmit was of Dutch-Jewish descent, 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.
Goudsmit studied physics at the University of Leiden under Paul Ehrenfest, where he obtained his PhD in 1927. 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.
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. Alsos was part of the Manhattan Project, which 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 that the German scientists simply did not understand how to make an atomic bomb. Both of these conclusions have been disputed by later historians (see Heisenberg), and the fact that the totalitarian Soviet state produced the bomb shortly after the book's release.
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