Martijn van Calmthout - Sam Goudsmit and the Hunt for Hitler’s Atom Bomb

Published 2018 by Prometheus Books

Sam Goudsmit and the Hunt for Hitler's Atom Bomb. 2016 Martijn van Calmthout and Meulenhoff Boekerij bv, Amsterdam. Translation 2018 Michiel Horn and Prometheus Books. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Dutch title: Sam Goudsmit: zijn jacht op de atoombom van Hitler. Published in 2016 in Dutch by Meulenhoff bockerij (Amsterdam). Published by special arrangement with Meulenhoff Boekerij B. V. in conjunction with their duly appointed agent, 2 Seas Literary Agency.

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Dutch Foundation for Literature.

Trademarked names appear throughout this book. Prometheus Books recognizes all registered trademarks, trademarks, and service marks mentioned in the text.

Cover image AIP Emilio Segr Visual Archives, Goudsmit Collection
Cover design by Jacqueline Nasso Cooke
Cover design Prometheus Books

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Calmthout, Martijn van, author. | Horn, Michiel, 1939- editor, translator.

Title: Sam Goudsmit and the hunt for Hitler's atom bomb / Martijn van Calmthout ; edited and translated by Michiel Horn.

Other titles: Sam Goudsmit. English

Description: Amherst, New York : Prometheus Books, 2018. | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018025568| ISBN 9781633884502 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781633884519 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Goudsmit, Samuel A. (Samuel Abraham), 1902-1978. | Physicists--Netherlands--Biography. | Jews--Netherlands--Biography. | Atomic bomb--Germany--History--20th century.

Classification: LCC DS135.N6 G65613 2018 | DDC 530.092 [B] --dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018025568

Printed in the United States of America

Those who survive never again live for themselves alone, but always also for the dead.

Gyrgy Konrd

There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknownsthe ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.

Donald Rumsfeld, United States Secretary of Defense (20012006)

In translating Martijn van Calmthout's fascinating biography of Samuel Goudsmit, I incurred two debts. The first is to Martijn himself, who cheerfully responded to my frequent questions and comments. The second is to my wife, Cornelia Schuh, who is also my volunteer in-house copy editor. She read the entire text and often improved it. I am grateful to both of them.

In addition, I want to thank Lauren Humphries-Brooks at Prometheus Books, who did an excellent job copyediting the text.

Occasionally it proved impossible to obtain the original English text of passages that Martijn had translated into Dutch. In these cases I had to translate them back into English, which is, of course, not standard practice. These instances are indicated in the book with an asterisk.

Michiel Horn
Toronto, ON, May 2018

As was the custom in those days, in the summer of 1925 Leiden University organized a festive event in honor of Professor Hendrik Antoon Lorentz, elder statesman of theoretical physics and a national celebrity. It had been fifty years since Lorentz had obtained his doctoral degree from Leiden, and that called for a celebration. Leading scientists had come from around the world for the occasion. Among them were Albert Einstein from Berlin, father of the theory of relativity, and from Copenhagen, Niels Bohr, who in 1913 had grasped the makeup of the hydrogen atom.

Seated in the first row of the auditorium of the Kamerlingh Onnes Laboratory, the two men listened attentively to the respectful and learned speeches. But a moment came when they turned around and allowed their host, Paul Ehrenfest, to point out two students to them, Samuel Goudsmit and George Uhlenbeck. The students did not know where to look. Only when it was clear that Ehrenfest wanted to introduce his two students to Einstein and Bohr did they relax a little. Could the gentlemen elucidate their recently published article about the rotating electron a bit more closely? Of course, said Uhlenbeck, the more self-assured of the two. They can certainly do that.

During the next few days, while the festivities continued, the students spoke a few more times with the two great men about the new concept of electron spin, as the rotation was immediately called in those days. Einstein and Bohr recognized it as a major breakthrough, even if the mathematics needed to be tightened up.

The 1925 encounter between the two timid Leiden science students and the giants Einstein and Bohr, also described in Martin Klein's unfinished biography of Paul Ehrenfest, was, when I read it, the first time that the name of Samuel Goudsmit came to my attention. More than ten years ago I was working on a popular-science fictionalized biography of Albert Einstein, in which his Leiden connections intrigued me. Einstein was, so it appeared, so much at home in Leiden that he had his own room in Paul Ehrenfest's house on Witte Rozenstraat, with a backup violin for sociable entertainment during the long winter evenings, accompanied by Ehrenfest at the piano.

Every physics student knows the concept of electron spin. The rotating electron is the key to understanding atoms and the light they emit. In reality there is, of course, nothing resembling a small rotating sphere. The student learns that only quantum theory can properly describe the spin. But what is generally missing is the story of the discovery of the electron spin. Not in a laboratory or theoretical institute in a distant foreign country, but simply in Leiden, Holland. The reading room where it happened is still there. You can go visit it, and it is, in fact, incomprehensible that there is no commemorative plaque on the door. At the same time, this is characteristic of the lack of interest most physicists show in historical matters.

That explains in part why no biography of Goudsmit (19021978) has ever been published, even though he is one of the founders of modern physics. No matter how important electron spin is from the point of view of physics, its discoverers have remained a footnote to history.