Samuel Goudsmit

Vocation

Notable

Dutch-American physicist famous for jointly proposing the concept of electron spin with George Eugene Uhlenbeck in 1925. He was the son of Isaac Goudsmit (11 February 1873, Den Haag - 12 February 1943, Auschwitz), a businessman, and Marianne Gompers (25 July 1873, Amsterdam - 12 February 1943, Auschwitz), who ran a millinery shop. Most of his Jewish family members were killed by the Nazi's. He and his elder sister Rachel Rosemary Goudsmit (23 November 1898, Den Haag- 22 March 2003, New York) survived the Holocaust. After receiving his PhD in 1927 under Paul Ehrenfest, Goudsmit emigrated to the USA, where he 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 on radar techniques. After the invasion of Normandy, he became the scientific head of the Alsos Mission, that had to investigate the development of mass destructive weapons by the Nazi's. Goudsmit spoke Dutch, English and French and was in a good position to interrogate captured German scientists. Of course the Allied fear was that Germany would develop a nuclear bomb before the Manhattan project of the USA (1942-46). Initially, Goudsmit was unaware of what happened to his Jewish family in Poland. From 1946 to 1947, Goudsmit was professor of physics at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois. He moved from Northwestern to become a senior scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory. He remained at Brookhaven until his retirement in 1970. From 1970 until his death he was a Visiting Professor of Physics at the University of Nevada at Reno. He was also visiting professor at Harvard University and Rockefeller University. In 1952, Goudsmit was a member of a distinguished group of scientists who formed a Scientific Advisory Panel on Unidentified Flying Objects. He also made some scholarly contributions to Egyptology (1972, 1974, 1981). The Samuel A. Goudsmit Collection of Egyptian Antiquities resides at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Goudsmit and Uhlenbeck received the Research Corporation Awards in 1953, Max Planck Medals in 1964, U. S. National Medals of Science in 1976, and were made Commanders in the Royal Netherlands Order of Orange-Nassau in 1977. Personal On 19 January 1927 Goudsmit married Jaantje Logher (4 May 1903, Den Haag - 5 January 1980, Ann Harbor) in in Den Haag. That year they emigrated to the USA. Summer 1933 they had a daughter Esther Marianne. They divorced in 1960. Goudsmit remarried Irene Bejach (1927, Berlin - 1992), the adoptive sister of Richard and David Attenborough. Link to Wikipedia