A prominent figure in American physics, Samuel A. Goudsmit was an authority on atomic energy and nuclear research, and was the co-discoverer of the electron spin. Goudsmit was educated in the Netherlands, where he received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Leiden in 1927. While still a graduate student, Goudsmit, in collaboration with fellow physics student George Uhlenbeck, made the discovery for which he is most famous: electron spin. That discovery explained some important theoretical predictions by physicists Wolfgang Pauli and Paul Dirac as well as a number of anomalies in the existing atomic theory. Nobel Prize winner and physics professor Isidore I. Rabi was quoted by Daniel Lang in New Yorker as observing that the discovery "was a tremendous feat. Why those two men never received a Nobel Prize for it will always be a mystery to me." During World War II, Goudsmit led a...