Samuel Goudsmit

Samuel Goudsmit was a physicist whose work with George Eugene Uhlenbeck helped establish the concept of electron spin in 1925. In the book, he appears both within the lively scientific world surrounding J. Robert Oppenheimer at Göttingen and in a later episode that follows their circle of physicists to New York. His recollection of Oppenheimer’s lavish hospitality preserves a revealing detail: the welcome extended to the group was, above all, for Charlotte Riefenstahl.

Scientific Work and Göttingen

During the academic year Oppenheimer spent at Göttingen, Goudsmit belonged to an exceptional community of physicists whose work was reshaping theoretical science. He and Uhlenbeck had discovered electron spin in late 1925. The book places their achievement alongside the wider transformation then under way in quantum physics, while specifically identifying the two men as collaborators and accomplished physicists.

Oppenheimer had met Goudsmit and Uhlenbeck during an earlier visit to the University of Leiden. Uhlenbeck later remembered that he and Oppenheimer had got along immediately, and that Oppenheimer’s absorption in physics made him seem like an old friend. This recollection gives Goudsmit’s later reunion with Oppenheimer a background of existing acquaintance, though the book does not describe a separate personal or scientific collaboration between Goudsmit and Oppenheimer.

The New York Reunion

At the end of the summer, Oppenheimer learned that Charlotte Riefenstahl had accepted a teaching position at Vassar College. When her boat arrived in New York Harbor in September, he was there to meet her. Goudsmit was traveling with her, together with Uhlenbeck and Uhlenbeck’s new wife, Else. Oppenheimer knew Goudsmit and Uhlenbeck as physicists and spared no expense in hosting the visitors.

Goudsmit recalled the reception as the “real Oppenheimer treatment,” while making clear that its principal purpose was to honor Charlotte. Oppenheimer met the party in a chauffeur-driven limousine and took them to a hotel he had chosen in Greenwich Village. In Goudsmit’s account, the gesture combines grand hospitality with a pointed qualification: the gathering was not simply a tribute to the visiting scientists, but an occasion arranged chiefly for Charlotte.

A Witness to Oppenheimer’s Courtship

Over the following weeks, Oppenheimer escorted Charlotte around New York, from art galleries to expensive restaurants. He introduced her to his parents at their Riverside Drive apartment, an indication that his attentions were serious. Goudsmit’s account of the group’s arrival offers a brief witness’s view of the elaborate welcome that began this courtship, rather than a sustained portrait of Goudsmit himself.

Charlotte admired Oppenheimer and was flattered by his attention, but felt that he was emotionally unavailable and evaded her efforts to draw him out about his past. She also found the Oppenheimer home stifling and overprotective. Distance grew between them as her work kept her away from New York and Oppenheimer’s fellowship required him to be at Harvard; she eventually returned to Germany and later married Fritz Houtermans. Goudsmit’s role in this episode remains that of a visiting colleague and eyewitness, but his recollection helps distinguish the public spectacle of Oppenheimer’s welcome from the more complicated relationship it was meant to advance.