H. H. Goldsmith
This episode is from the WNYC archives. It may contain language which is no longer politically or socially appropriate.
WNYC announcer introduces program and Goldsmith, of the Department of Physics at City College, who talks about "Atomic Physics in War."
Our success in this war depends more on scientific knowledge than any previous war. Sensational advances in the field of physics. Building a bomber, need rubber, which is in short supply. The atom. Cadmium. The atom is like a radio station. Measuring light emitted by atoms with an spectroscope. Dropping bombs from planes. Elaborate bomb sites.
WNYC announcer concludes program.
Biographical note:
Hyman H. Goldsmith was an American physicist and became coordinator of information for the Metallurgical Lab in Chicago. After the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Goldsmith was one of many atomic scientists that wanted there to be control on nuclear weapons.
Goldsmith helped establish the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists with John Simpson and Eugene Rabinowitch. He served as a co-editor with Rabinowitch until his passing. He also worked as chief of the information and publications division at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island.
In 1945 Goldsmith and botanist and biophysicist Eugene Rabinowitch published the bulletin's Doomsday Clock, with its hands set to seven minutes to midnight, for the first time in 1947. The clock was meant to warn of the dangers of nuclear annihilation; it was moved one minute closer to midnight the following year after the first Soviet nuclear test.
On August 7, 1949, Goldsmith died tragically at the age of 42 after being swept over a waterfall while swimming in the West River in Vermont.
Audio courtesy of the City University of New York
WNYC archives id: 71477
