Samuel Abraham Goudsmit was born in The Hague, Netherlands, on July 11, 1902. His mother, Marianne Gompers Goudsmit, ran a millinery shop and his father, Isaac, was a wholesale dealer in bathroom fixtures. Goudsmit studied theoretical physics at the University of Leiden (1919-26), did experimental research at the University of Amsterdam (1923-26), and received his Ph.D. in physics from Leiden in 1927. In 1927 he married Jaantje Logher and immigrated to the United States. His first position was on the physics faculty at the University of Michigan. He remained there until World War II when he joined the staff of the Radiation Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 1944 to 1946 he was detailed to the War Department as Chief of Scientific Intelligence of the Alsos Mission which moved with the advancing Allied forces in Europe to investigate the German atomic bomb project.
After the war, Goudsmit was a professor of physics at Northwestern University (1946-48) and then became senior scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory (1948-70). He served as the Managing Editor and later Editor-in-Chief of the American Physical Society (1951-74), founding its Physical Review Letters in 1958. From 1975 until his death he was a Visiting Professor at the University of Nevada, Reno. The discovery of electron spin in 1925 with fellow student George E. Uhlenbeck is generally considered Goudsmit's most significant contribution to physics. It led to the recognition that spin was a property of protons, neutrons, and most elementary particles and to a fundamental change in the mathematical structure of quantum mechanics. For their groundbreaking work, they received Research Corporation Awards in 1953, Max Planck Medals in 1964, U.S. National Medals of Science in 1976, and were made Commanders in the Royal Netherlands Order of Orange-Nassau in 1977. Goudsmit also made the first measurement of nuclear spin and its Zeeman effect with Ernst Back (1926-27), developed a theory of hyperfine structure of spectral lines, made the first spectroscopic determination of nuclear magnetic moments (1931-33), contributed to the theory of complex atoms and the theory of multiple scattering of electrons, introduced the statistical random line problem (1940), and invented the magnetic time-of-flight mass spectrometer (1948). Goudsmit was the recipient of many other awards and fellowships, lectured around the country and abroad, was a Visiting Professor at a number of universities including Harvard University and Rockefeller University, and was the author of The Structure of Line Spectra with Linus Pauling (1930), Atomic Energy States with Robert F. Bacher (1932), Alsos (1947), Time with R. Claiborne and the editors of Life Magazine (1966), and numerous articles and editorials. Goudsmit had one daughter from his first marriage, Esther Marianne, and in 1960 married Irene Bejach. He died in 1978.
