biography
| name: |
Goudsmit, Samuel (Abraham)
|
pronunciation:
[gudsmit]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1902–78)
|
| biography:
| Physicist, born in The Hague, The Netherlands. He studied in Amsterdam and Leyden, and emigrated in 1927 to the USA, where he was professor at Michigan (1932–46) and later worked at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, Long Island (1948–70). Aged 23, he and his fellow-student George Uhlenbeck (1900–88) had proposed the idea that electrons in atoms can show an effect which they described as electron spin, a novel and important concept which soon proved to be correct. In World War 2 he headed the secret Alsos mission (1944) charged with following German progress in atomic bomb research; this led to the award of the US Medal of Freedom, and to his book Alsos (1947). |
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