Samuel Abraham Goudsmit: The physicist who hunted for Hitler's atom bomb

Samuel Abraham Goudsmit (1902-1978) is "famous for jointly proposing the concept of electron spin with George Eugene Uhlenbeck in 1925", or so an anonymous contributor to Wikipedia informs us (Wikipedia contributors 2018). He seems to be virtually unknown outside the world of physics. Mart...

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Veröffentlicht in:Canadian journal of Netherlandic Studies 2017-01, Vol.38, p.69
1. Verfasser: Horn, Michiel
Format: Artikel
Sprache:eng
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Zusammenfassung:Samuel Abraham Goudsmit (1902-1978) is "famous for jointly proposing the concept of electron spin with George Eugene Uhlenbeck in 1925", or so an anonymous contributor to Wikipedia informs us (Wikipedia contributors 2018). He seems to be virtually unknown outside the world of physics. Martijn van Calmthout, chief science editor of De Volkskrant, has sought to change this with a biography of Sam Goudsmit published in 2016 (Van Calmthout 2016). Goudsmit was born in Den Haag, the younger of two children in a petit-bourgeois Jewish family. His parents worked in the retail sector as owners of small enterprises, and the family was financially comfortable without being wealthy. In 1941 Goudsmit volunteered for war-related research, working on radar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Two years later he was asked to become the scientific head of the Alsos Mission. Unlike the Manhattan Project, to which it was intellectually linked, Alsos is little known today. The Manhattan Project was the name given to the effort to produce a nuclear weapon.
ISSN:0225-0500