Alsos (History of Modern Physics and Astronomy) - Hardcover

Goudsmit, Samuel A.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0938228099 ISBN 13: 9780938228097

Publisher: American Institute of Physics, 1983

Synopsis

Alsos was a scientific intelligence mission launched by the Allies in the autumn of 1943 to determine the progress of German research on the atom bomb. With the suspense of a thriller, Goudsmit recounts the circumstances leading up to the mission, the methods its participants used to do their scientific sleuthing, and the reaction of the German scientists on the day the atom bomb fell on Hiroshima. With a new introduction by David Cassidy About the Author: Samuel Goudsmit was born in The Netherlands and in 1925 he and fellow student George Uhlenbeck discovered electron spin. In 1927 he emigrated to the U.S., working at the University of Michigan and later at MIT until being detailed to the War Department to participate in the Alsos Mission. He served as a senior scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory from 1954 to 1970 and was the founder of Physical Review Letters.

About this title

From the Back Cover

During the final weeks of World War II in Europe, as Allied armies swept across a chaotic, battle-torn Germany, two teams of the world's leading nuclear scientists were desperately at work. One team, sequestered in the New Mexican desert, hastened to assemble the atomic bombs that would shake the world later that summer. The other team, a group of Nazi-sponsored physicists and technicians in southern Germany, struggled to do something that, unbeknownst to them, the Allies had done two years earlier: build a critical, self-sustaining nuclear reactor. Meanwhile, a different kind of team was running its own race against time. Convinced (erroneously) that the Germans were close to creating their own superweapon, the Allies sent an American unit of scientists, soldiers, and secret agents established by Lieutenant General Leslie R. Groves into Nazi Germany. Their orders: find the German scientific team before they could provide Hitler with atomic power. The scientific head of the mission: a Dutch-American physicist named Samuel A. Goudsmit. The mission code name: Alsos. As his small entourage moved closer to the German research camp, Goudsmit revisited familiar people and places now changed forever by the war. The first Allied scientist to interrogate the captured physicists, Goudsmit heard first hand about life in a Nazi Germany in which they had lived and worked for over a decade. Most importantly, as the last person to review German nuclear research papers before military classification barred them from the public eye, Goudsmit was uniquely qualified to answer the most puzzling question: why, after their spectacular early successes, did German nuclear research efforts fall so miserably?Goudsmit's insights into the errors and hindrances that frustrated the German scientists, as well as his penetrating character analyses, remain uncannily accurate, as proven a half-century later by the now de-classified documents.

About the Author

Samuel A. Goudsmit served as a senior scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory from 1954 to 1970 and was the editor of the Physical Review and founder of Physical Review Letters.

Edition details

• Publisher: American Institute of Physics
• Publication date: 1983
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0938228099
• ISBN 13: 9780938228097
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 272