(This is a welcome reissue, with a new Preface, of John S....)
This is a welcome reissue, with a new Preface, of John S. Rigden’s stellar biography of I. I. Rabi, one of the most influential physicists of the twentieth century. Rabi’s discovery of the magnetic resonance method won him the Nobel Prize in 1944 and stimulated research leading to, among other things, refinements in quantum electrodynamics, refined molecular beam methods, radio astronomy with the hydrogen 21-cm line, atomic clocks, and solid state masers.
Isidor Isaac Rabi was Austrian physics educator and Nobel laureate, recognized in 1944 for his discovery of nuclear magnetic resonance, which is used in magnetic resonance imaging. He was also one of the first scientists in the US to work on the cavity magnetron, which is used in microwave radar and microwave ovens.
Background
Israel Isaac Rabi was born on 29 July 1898 into a Polish Jewish Orthodox family in Rymanów, Galicia, in what was then part of Austria-Hungary but is now Poland. Soon after he was born, his father, David Rabi, emigrated to the United States. The younger Rabi and his mother, Sheindel, joined David there a few months later, and the family moved into a two-room apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. At home the family spoke Yiddish. When Rabi was enrolled in school, Sheindel said his name was Izzy, and a school official, thinking it was short for Isidor, put that down as his name. Henceforth, that became his official name. Later, in response to anti-Semitism, he started writing his name as Isidor Isaac Rabi, and was known professionally as I.I. Rabi. To most of his friends and family, including his sister Gertrude, who was born in 1903, he was known simply as "Rabi", which was pronounced "Robby". In 1907, the family moved to Brownsville, Brooklyn, where they ran a grocery store.
Education
As a boy, Rabi was interested in science. He read science books borrowed from the public library and built his own radio set. His first scientific paper, on the design of a radio condenser, was published in Modern Electrics when he was in elementary school. After reading about Copernican heliocentrism, he became an atheist. "It's all very simple", he told his parents, adding, "Who needs God?" As a compromise with his parents, for his Bar Mitzvah, which was held at home, he gave a speech in Yiddish about how an electric light works. He attended the Manual Training High School in Brooklyn, from which he graduated in 1916. Later that year, he entered Cornell University as an electrical engineering student, but soon switched to chemistry. After the American entry into World War I in 1917, he joined the Student Army Training Corps at Cornell. For his senior thesis, he investigated the oxidation states of manganese. He was awarded his Bachelor of Science degree in June 1919, but since at the time Jews were largely excluded from employment in the chemical industry and academia, he did not receive any job offers. He worked briefly at the Lederle Laboratories, and then as a bookkeeper.
In 1922 Rabi returned to Cornell as a graduate chemistry student, and began studying physics. In 1923 he met, and began courting, Helen Newmark, a summer-semester student at Hunter College. In order to be near her when she returned home, Rabi continued his studies at Columbia University, where his supervisor was Albert Wills. In June 1924 Rabi landed a job as a part-time tutor at the City College of New York. Wills, whose specialty was magnetism, suggested that Rabi write his doctoral thesis on the magnetic susceptibility of sodium vapor. The topic did not appeal to Rabi, but after William Lawrence Bragg gave a seminar at Columbia about the electric susceptibility of certain crystals called Tutton's salts, Rabi decided to research their magnetic susceptibility, and Wills agreed to be his supervisor.
Measuring the magnetic resonance of crystals first involved growing the crystals, a simple procedure often done by elementary school students. The crystals then had to be prepared by skillfully cutting them into sections with facets that had an orientation different from the internal structure of the crystal, and the response to a magnetic field had to be painstakingly measured. While his crystals were growing, Rabi read James Clerk Maxwell's 1873 A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, which inspired an easier method. He lowered a crystal on a glass fiber attached to a torsion balance into a solution whose magnetic susceptibility could be varied between two magnetic poles. When it matched that of the crystal, the magnet could be turned on and off without disturbing the crystal. The new method not only required much less work, it also produced a more accurate result. Rabi sent his thesis, entitled On the Principal Magnetic Susceptibilities of Crystals, to Physical Review on 16 July 1926. He married Helen the next day. The paper attracted little fanfare in academic circles, although it was read by Kariamanickam Srinivasa Krishnan, who used the method in his own investigations of crystals. Rabi concluded that he needed to promote his work as well as publish it.
Like many other young physicists, Rabi was closely following momentous events in Europe. He was astounded by the Stern–Gerlach experiment, which convinced him of the validity of quantum mechanics. With Ralph Kronig, Francis Bitter, Mark Zemansky and others, he set out to extend the Schrödinger equation to symmetric top molecules and find the energy states of such a mechanical system. The problem was that none of them could solve the resulting equation, a second-order partial differential equation. Rabi found the answer in a book by the 19th-century mathematician Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi. The equation had the form of a hypergeometric equation to which Jacobi had found a solution. Kronig and Rabi wrote up their result and sent it to Physical Review, which published it in 1927.
Career
It was at Cornell that he discovered his real bent for physics. To meet expenses he took a job teach¬ing physics at New York, City College, and in 1927, received a doctorate from Columbia University. With a postdoctoral grant from Columbia he pro¬ceeded to Europe, where for the next two years he studied theory with Wolfgang Pauli and worked with Otto Stern on the Stern-Gerlach experiments for measuring the magnetic characteristics of atoms, work which eventually led him to a Nobel Prize. In 1929 he was offered a lectureship in Columbia University’s physics department. Shifting between teaching on one hand and experimentation in nuclear physics, quantum mechanics and magnetism on the other hand, he acquired a reputation in both. In 1940 he became an associate director of the radiation laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1944 he won a Nobel Prize for physics, for inventing the atomic and molecular beam magnetic resonance method for registering magnetic properties of atomic nuclei. In 1950 he became a full professor at Columbia University.
During World War II Rabi worked for the Office of Scientific Research and Development. After the war he served on advisory committees of the Defense Department and the Atomic Energy Commission and, in the early 1950s, helped to create the European Center for Nuclear Research, which brought eleven European nations together in the field of high energy physics. He was active with others, such as Enrico Fermi and J. Robert Oppenheimer, in the advisory committee of the Atomic Energy Commission, which in the postwar years was primarily concerned with increasing the U.S. atomic arsenal. He himself, however, was concerned about finding peaceful uses for atomic energy and, when the question of a crash program for building a thermonuclear superbomb arose among the scientists, only he and Enrico Fermi among the scientists were on record as being completely opposed to the construction of the weapon.
He also worked for the Brookhaven National Laboratory for Atomic Research, the U.N. Science Committee and the Atomic Energy Agency, served as science adviser to President Dwight Eisenhower, and was on the board of governors of the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot.
Rabi died at his home on Riverside Drive in Manhattan from cancer on 11 January 1988.His wife, Helen, survived him and died at the age of 102 on 18 June 2005. In his last days, he was reminded of his greatest achievement when his physicians examined him using magnetic resonance imaging, a technology that had been developed from his ground-breaking research on magnetic resonance. The machine happened to have a reflective inner surface, and he remarked: "I saw myself in that machine... I never thought my work would come to this."
Trustee associate University, Inc., since 1946, president, 1961—1962, chairman board, 1962—1963. Board governors Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovoth, Israel, since 1949, vice president, 1986. Trustee Mount Sinai Hospital, since 1960.
Fellow: American Physical Society (president 1950-1951). Member: Columbia University, New York Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Sciences, Japan Academy of Sciences (foreign member), American Philosophical Society, Council Foreign Relations, Athenaeum Club (London), Cosmos Club (Washington), Century Club, Sigma Xi.
Connections
Married Helen Newark, 1926. Children: Nancy Elizabeth, Margaret Joella.