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Sam Goudsmit and the Hunt for Hitler's Atom Bomb

ebook
2 of 2 copies available
2 of 2 copies available
The first biography in English of a leading Dutch American physicist, who discovered the subatomic property of "spin" and spearheaded the search for Hitler's atom bomb as World War II came to an end.This engaging biography of an important Dutch physicist brings to light his significant scientific contributions and remarkable life story. Based on recently released archives and material from Goudsmit's daughter Esther, science journalist Martijn van Calmthout has reconstructed a life marked by both brilliance and tragedy.As a young man Sam Goudsmit came to international attention when he and a colleague published a seminal paper that introduced the property of electron spin into atomic theory. This discovery helped to remove remaining questions about atomic theory and brought him into contact with the likes of Einstein, Heisenberg, and other leading physicists of the early 20th century. In 1927, he was offered a position at the University of Michigan and moved with his wife to the United States. When the Nazis invaded the Netherlands, Goudsmit, a Jew, feared for the lives of his parents and other family members still in Holland. His attempts to get his German colleague Werner Heisenberg to intervene on their behalf proved fruitless. Toward the end of World War II, he was recruited by the Department of Defense as the scientific leader of the co-called Alsos mission, whose task was to search for evidence of German atom-bomb development. The team eventually found stores of uranium ore and a nuclear reactor, among other evidence. While in Europe, Goudsmit had an opportunity to return to The Hague, his hometown. There in the rubble of his parent's house, he discovered that they had been deported to Auschwitz.After the war, he returned to the United States and became the editor of Physical Review and Physical Review Letters; the latter is a leading physics journal to this day. But guilt over his failure to save his parents haunted him for the rest of his life.This is a biography that in part reads like a thriller and restores long-overdue recognition to an important 20th-century physicist.
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      September 24, 2018
      From March 1944 to October 1945, Dutch physicist Goudsmit headed Alsos, a secret American mission to discover just how close Hitler had gotten to having an atomic bomb. This heavy-going biography by science journalist van Calmthout (Einstein’s Light) elucidates why Goudsmit was chosen for the job—partly because of connections from his student days with German quantum theorist Werner Heisenberg—and what he and an accompanying military unit discovered as they pored over abandoned Nazi laboratories in Paris, Strasbourg, Berlin, and elsewhere behind the Allies’ advance. While packed with information, the story is encumbered by a jumbled structure, which jumps back and forth between different years and places, sometimes cramming them together in asides that read more like detours than insights into the main action. Moreover, van Calmthout fails to develop Goudsmit into a flesh-and-blood person. The author covers aspects of the scientist’s professional and personal life, including his emigration to the U.S., collaborations with other nuclear physicists, grief over his parents’ death in Auschwitz, and work as the editor of a physics journal, but in consistently cumbersome prose. Van Calmthout’s work will be largely restricted in appeal to hard-core nuclear history buffs. Agent: Chrysothemis Armefti, 2 Seas Agency.

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  • English

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