Samuel Abraham Goudsmit
Samuel Abraham Goudschmidt (born July 11, 1902 in The Hague , Netherlands , † December 4, 1978 in Reno , Nevada , USA ) was an American physicist of Dutch origin. In the United States, the surname was later changed to Samuel Goudsmit .
In addition to various work on atomic and nuclear physics, he postulated the existence of the electron spin together with George Eugene Uhlenbeck as a student in Leiden in 1925 . In 1927 he received his doctorate in Leiden and was from 1927 Associate Professor and from 1932 Professor at the University of Michigan . After the war, he was a professor at Northwestern University from 1946 to 1948 and then went to Brookhaven National Laboratory as a senior scientist in 1948 , where he stayed until his retirement in 1970. He lectured at the New School for Social Research in New York City (1948 to 1951), the United States Navy Bureau of Ships (1949 to 1959), the Rockefeller Institute (1957 to 1974) and from 1975 to 1978 at the University of Nevada in Reno.
Goudschmidt was in the Second World War 1941 to 1946 at the Radiation Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and towards the end of the war as a senior scientist in the Alsos Mission , about which he also wrote a book. As part of Operation Epsilon , he captured Werner Heisenberg's group in Hechingen and then brought them to Farm Hall in England, leading the French (with the French physicist Yves Rocard ). In his book he attributed the failure of the group of German nuclear physicists around Heisenberg in the German nuclear weapons project to scientific failure, which did not go unchallenged.
From 1951 to 1966 he was the managing editor of Physical Review and from 1958 to 1978 editor of Physical Review Letters. In 1976 he received the National Medal of Science . Since 1947 he was a member of the National Academy of Sciences , in 1952 he was elected to the American Philosophical Society and in 1964 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In 2001 the asteroid (9688) Goudsmit was named after him.
Samuel Goudsmit (pictured right) during the Alsos III mission in Stadtilm, April 1945
Fonts
- Alsos: The failure of german science, Sigma Books 1947
- with Clairborne and the Time-Life editorial team: Die Zeit, Time-Life books 1969
- The discovery of the electron spin , Physikalische Blätter, October 1965
Web links
- Literature by and about Samuel Abraham Goudsmit in the catalog of the German National Library
- Samuel A. Goudsmit. In: Physics History Network. American Institute of Physics
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Goudsmit, Samuel Abraham |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Goudschmidt, Samuel Abraham |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American physicist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | July 11, 1902 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | The Hague , Netherlands |
| DATE OF DEATH | 4th December 1978 |
| Place of death | Reno , Nevada, USA |