Samuel Goudsmit | |
|---|---|
 Goudsmit in c. 1940 | |
| Born | Samuel Abraham Goudsmit (1902-07-11)July 11, 1902 The Hague, Netherlands |
| Died | December 4, 1978(1978-12-04) (aged 76) Reno, Nevada, U.S. |
| Alma mater | University of Leiden(Ph.D) (1927) |
| Known for | |
| Spouses | |
| Children | |
| Awards | National Medal of Science(1976) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Physics |
| Institutions | University of Michigan |
| Doctoral students | Robert Bacher |
Samuel Abraham Goudsmit (July 11, 1902 – December 4, 1978) was a Dutch-American physicist famous for jointly proposing the concept of electronspin withGeorge Eugene Uhlenbeck in 1925.[3][4]
Goudsmit, along with Uhlenbeck, was nominated numerous times for theNobel Prize in Physics for their discovery ofelectron spin but never won, despite strong support from nominators.I. I. Rabi remarked that the omission of Goudsmit and Uhlenbeck from the Nobel Prize list "will always be a mystery to me."[5]
Goudsmit was born inThe Hague, Netherlands, ofDutch Jewish descent. He was the son of Isaac Goudsmit, a manufacturer ofwater-closets, and Marianne Goudsmit-Gompers, who ran a millinery shop. In 1943, his parents were deported to aconcentration camp by the German occupiers of the Netherlands and were murdered there.[6]
Goudsmit studiedphysics at theUniversity of Leiden underPaul Ehrenfest,[7] where he obtained his PhD in 1927.[8] After receiving his PhD, Goudsmit served as a professor at theUniversity of Michigan between 1927 and 1946. In 1930 he co-authored a text withLinus Pauling titledThe Structure of Line Spectra.
DuringWorld War II he worked at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology.[9] As scientific head of theAlsos Mission, he successfully reached a German group of nuclear physicists aroundWerner Heisenberg andOtto Hahn atHechingen (then French zone) in advance of French physicistYves Rocard, who had previously succeeded in recruiting German scientists to come to France.[citation needed]
Alsos, part of theManhattan Project, was designed to assess the progress of theNazi atomic bomb project. In the bookAlsos, 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 atotalitarian state and to Nazi scientists' lack of understanding of how to engineer an atomic bomb. Both of these conclusions have been disputed by later historians (seeHeisenberg) and contradicted by the fact that the totalitarian Soviet state produced the bomb shortly after the book's release.[10] However that statement overlooks the actions of physicist Klaus Fuchs who sent "many intelligence reports directly from Los Alamos".
After the war he was briefly a professor atNorthwestern University, and from 1948 to 1970 was a senior scientist at theBrookhaven National Laboratory, chairing the Physics Department 1952–1960. He meanwhile became well known as editor-in-chief of the leading physics journalPhysical Review, published by theAmerican Physical Society. In July 1958 he started the journalPhysical Review Letters,[11] which offers short notes with attendant brief delays.[12] On his retirement as editor in 1974, Goudsmit moved to the faculty of theUniversity of Nevada, Reno, where he remained until his death four years later.[citation needed]
As a student in Leiden he also developed an interest inAncient Egypt.[13] He collected Egyptian antiquities and made a few scholarly contributions toEgyptology. His wife bequeathed theSamuel A. Goudsmit Collection of Egyptian Antiquities to theKelsey Museum of Archaeology at theUniversity of Michigan inAnn Arbor, Michigan.[14] In 2017 it was announced that Dutch EgyptologistNico Staring had identified an object from the collection with an object presumed lost from theEgyptian Museum of Berlin. The fragmentary stela must have been looted from the museum after its bombardment and had been sold to Goudsmit in 1945. It was returned to Berlin in April 2017.[15]
Goudsmit became a corresponding member of theRoyal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1939, though he resigned the next year. He was readmitted in 1950.[16] He was elected to the United StatesNational Academy of Sciences in 1947,[17] theAmerican Philosophical Society in 1952,[18]American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1964.[19]
Goudsmit married Jaantje Logher, in 1927.[2] Their daughter, Esther Marianne Goudsmit was born in 1933 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. In 1964 she earned a PhD in Zoology from the University of Michigan, and in 1972 became a Professor of Biology at Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan. She retired in 1995.
Samuel and Jaantje divorced in 1960, and in the same year Goudsmit married Irene Bejach.[1][2] Like Goudsmit's parents, Irene's father, a German medical doctor and Berlin public health official, Curt Dietrich Bejach, had been murdered by the Nazis. He perished at theAuschwitz concentration camp.[20][21]
Irene and her sister, Helga, left Germany for the United Kingdom as children shortly prior to the outbreak of World War II. They were evacuated as part of theKindertransport programme, and lived for seven years in theAttenborough family home.[21]
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