Goudsmit, Samuel Abraham 1902-78
US 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 University (1932-46) and later worked at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, Long Island (1948-70). Aged 23, he and his fellow student George Uhlenbeck proposed the idea that electrons in atoms can have intrinsic spin angular momentum. Initially physicists found it difficult to accept this rotational property of electrons, but P A M Dirac's 1928 theory of relativistic quantum mechanics showed that spin is an intrinsic property of the electron. During World War II, Goudsmit headed the secret Alsos mission charged with following German progress in atomic bomb research (1944), which led to the award of the US Medal of Freedom, and to his book Alsos (1947).