Alsos

by Samuel Goudsmit, David C. Cassidy (Introduction)

Overview

Near the end of World War II, as Allied armies swept across battle-torn Germany and leading scientists at Los Alamos were racing to assemble the atomic bombs America would drop over Japan later that summer, General Leslie Groves, the military head of the Manhattan Project, established Alsos, a unit of scientists, soldiers, and secret agents to find the Nazi Germany's physicists and technicians working on the development of a German atomic bomb and to determine how far along they were. In this book, Samuel Goudsmit, the Dutch-American physicist who was the scientific leader of the Alsos mission, recounts the mission and its findings.

"Alsos is more than a dramatic chronicle of how Goudsmit and his staff accompanied Allied troops in order to ferret out German atomic secrets and round up German scientists who might have been working on a fission bomb. It is also an overview and critique of the German research establishment under Nazi control." -- Albert Moyer, American Scientist

"Highly readable and informative... [T]he immediacy of Goudsmit's experience makes this memoir of enduring value... inspired story-telling that provides in retrospect a great deal of information on the operations of the postwar intelligence teams... An extraordinary book." -- Alan Beyerchen, New Scientist

"Samuel Goudsmit... the scientific leader of Alsos... tells the fascinating story of the mission's work... To the extent that the average citizen is permitted to learn how his servants spend his money for the purpose of insuring his safety, it will be useful for every intelligent American to hear Goudsmit's story and ponder his views. In any case, Alsos is highly entertaining... Goudsmit's assessment of Nazi war science is excellent... There are a lot of things in Goudsmit's book that we had better keep in mind." -- Paul Ridenour, The New York Times

"[Goudsmit's] short memoir is a thrilling combination of detective story and scientific deduction." -- Stephen Budiansky, Wall Street Journal

"[Alsos] is the compelling story of what the Germans did [to develop an atomic bomb], what went wrong and why." -- Lee Dembart, Los Angeles Times

"For the history of science this chatty little book is surely one of the most important books to emerge from World War II, since it is the account of one of the most absorbing war assignments to fall to the lot of any scientist." -- Henri Guerlac, Isis, A Journal of the History of Science Society

Product Details

BN ID:	2940158794032
Publisher:	Plunkett Lake Press
Publication date:	09/22/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	7 MB

About the Author

Born in The Hague, Netherlands, Samuel Goudsmit (1902-1978) received his PhD in physics in 1927 under Paul Ehrenfest at the University of Leiden where, with his fellow graduate student George Uhlenbeck, he discovered the electron’s spin. Their work led to the discovery of spin in other elementary particles and to fundamental changes in the mathematical structure of quantum mechanics. He joined the faculty at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor from 1927 until 1946, where his research focused on nuclear magnetism and atomic spectra. In 1930 he co-authored The Structure of Line Spectra with Linus Pauling.

In 1941, as World War II loomed, Goudsmit took leave from Michigan to join staff working on radar at the MIT Radiation Laboratory supporting Allied military efforts. Because of his upbringing in the Netherlands, his facility with languages, and his close relationship with many European physicists, Goudsmit was recruited to become Chief of Scientific Intelligence of Alsos in 1944, the War Department’s secret mission that sent a select group of scientists, secret agents and soldiers into Europe just behind the Allied liberation forces. Their assignment was to determine Nazi Germany’s progress in developing an atomic bomb and to secure associated enemy scientists. In the book Alsos, Goudsmit’s historical memoir of that mission published in 1947, he concludes that the Nazis were not close to creating an atomic bomb.

After completing the Alsos mission in 1946, Goudsmit was briefly Professor at Northwestern University and joined the newly formed Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1948, where he was Physics Department Chairman. From 1951 to 1962 he was Managing Editor of the leading physics journal Physical Review. In 1958 he founded Physical Review Letters to provide rapid publication of emerging scientific findings and later became the first Editor-in-Chief of the American Physical Society. In 1974, he became Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Nevada in Reno, where he remained until his death.

Goudsmit also made scholarly contributions to Egyptology. The Samuel A. Goudsmit Collection of Egyptian Antiquities is at the University of Michigan's Kelsey Museum of Archaeology in Ann Arbor.