Goudsmit was born in
The Hague, Netherlands, of
Dutch Jewish descent. He was the son of Isaac Goudsmit, a manufacturer of
water-closets, and Marianne Goudsmit-Gompers, who ran a millinery shop. In 1943, his parents were deported to a
concentration camp by the German occupiers of the Netherlands and were murdered there. Goudsmit studied
physics at the
University of Leiden under
Paul Ehrenfest, where he obtained his PhD in 1927. After receiving his PhD, Goudsmit served as a professor at the
University of Michigan between 1927 and 1946. In 1930 he co-authored a text with
Linus Pauling titled
The Structure of Line Spectra. During
World War II he worked at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As scientific head of the
Alsos Mission, he successfully reached a German group of nuclear physicists around
Werner Heisenberg and
Otto Hahn at
Hechingen (then French zone) in advance of French physicist
Yves Rocard, who had previously succeeded in recruiting German scientists to come to France. He was awarded the
Presidential Medal of Freedom for his work as part of the Alsos mission. Alsos, part of the
Manhattan Project, was designed to assess the progress of the
Nazi atomic bomb project. In the book
Alsos, published in 1947, Goudsmit concludes that the Germans did not get close to creating a weapon. He attributed this to the inability of science to function under a
totalitarian state and to Nazi scientists' lack of understanding of how to engineer an atomic bomb. Both of these conclusions have been disputed by later historians (see
Heisenberg) and contradicted by the fact that the totalitarian Soviet state produced the bomb shortly after the book's release. However that statement overlooks the actions of physicist Klaus Fuchs who sent "many intelligence reports directly from Los Alamos". in Uruguay, 1942, Rio Negro Hydro site works, when the Nazis German engineers were deported After the war he was briefly a professor at
Northwestern University, and from 1948 to 1970 was a senior scientist at the
Brookhaven National Laboratory, chairing the Physics Department 1952–1960. He meanwhile became well known as editor-in-chief of the leading physics journal
Physical Review, published by the
American Physical Society. In July 1958 he started the journal
Physical Review Letters, which offers short notes with attendant brief delays. On his retirement as editor in 1974, Goudsmit moved to the faculty of the
University of Nevada, Reno, where he remained until his death four years later. As a student in Leiden he also developed an interest in
Ancient Egypt. He collected Egyptian antiquities and made a few scholarly contributions to
Egyptology. His wife bequeathed the
Samuel A. Goudsmit Collection of Egyptian Antiquities to the
Kelsey Museum of Archaeology at the
University of Michigan in
Ann Arbor, Michigan. In 2017 it was announced that Dutch Egyptologist
Nico Staring had identified an object from the collection with an object presumed lost from the
Egyptian Museum of Berlin. The fragmentary stela must have been looted from the museum after its bombardment and had been sold to Goudsmit in 1945. It was returned to Berlin in April 2017. Goudsmit became a corresponding member of the
Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1939, though he resigned the next year. He was readmitted in 1950. He was elected to the United States
National Academy of Sciences in 1947, the
American Philosophical Society in 1952,
American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1964.
Marriages and children Goudsmit married Jaantje Logher, in 1927. Irene and her sister, Helga, left Germany for the United Kingdom as children shortly prior to the outbreak of World War II. They were evacuated as part of the
Kindertransport programme, and lived for seven years in the
Attenborough family home. ==Works==