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.[3][4]
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.[5]
Visualization of electron spin on a wall in Leiden
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 to Nazi scientists' lack of understanding of how to engineer 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.[9] However that statement overlooks the actions of physicist Klaus Fuchs who sent "many intelligence reports directly from Los Alamos". Read the book American Prometheus (2006), pages 285–286 by authors Kai Bird & Martin Sherwin.
Samuel Goudsmit and Wolfgang Pauli in Uruguay, 1942, Rio Negro Hydro site works, when the Nazis German engineers were deported.
As a student in Leiden he also developed an interest in Ancient Egypt.[12] He collected Egyptian antiquities and made a few scholarly contributions to Egyptology. His wife bequeathed the Samuel A. Goudsmit Collection of Egyptian Antiquities to the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology at the University of MichiganinAnn Arbor, Michigan.[13] In 2017 it was announced that Dutch Egyptologist Nico Staring had identified an object from the collection with an object presumed lost from the Egyptian 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.[14]
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 the Auschwitz concentration camp.[19][20]
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 the Kindertransport programme, and lived for seven years in the Attenborough family home.[20]
