Rabi, Isidor I

Rabi, Isidor I. (1898–1988), physicist and Nobel laureate.Born in eastern Europe, Isidor Isaac Rabi was brought by his parents to the United States when he was two years old. After obtaining his Ph.D. in physics from Columbia University in 1926, he went to Europe to study with the physicists who created quantum mechanics. In Otto Stern's Hamburg laboratory, Rabi began his work in molecular beam physics. From 1929 to 1967, he was a professor of physics at Columbia University. His discovery of the magnetic resonance method in 1938 won him the Nobel Prize in physics in 1944. A major field of study after World War II, the magnetic resonance method became the basis for the medical diagnostic method called magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

During World War II, Rabi served as the associate director of the Radiation Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where radar systems were developed. Rabi was also one of J. Robert Oppenheimer's senior advisers on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico.

After the war, Rabi became active in public affairs. As a member and chair of the Science Advisory Committee during President Dwight D. Eisenhower's administration, he reconstituted the group as the President's Science Advisory Committee, which reported directly to the president. With Dag Hammarskjöld, secretary general of the United Nations, he organized the first International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy, held in Geneva, in 1955.
See also Medicine: Since 1945; Nuclear Weapons; Physical Sciences; Science: From 1914 to 1945; Science: Since 1945.

Bibliography

John S. Rigden , Rabi: Scientist and Citizen, 1987.

John S. Rigden