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.
Rabi attended Cornell University (1916 - 1919), obtaining a bachelor's degree in chemistry. Deciding to pursue graduate study in physics, he returned to Cornell (1922 - 1923) and then transferred to Columbia University, where in 1927 he obtained his doctoral degree.
Rabi studied in Europe (1927 - 1929), working with some of the most outstanding physicists.
Otto Stern, with whom he remained for about a year, made the deepest impression on Rabi. Work on Atomic and Molecular Beams Immediately on his return to the United States, where he had accepted a position as lecturer in physics at Columbia, Rabi and his student V.
Cohen exploited the atomic-and molecular-beam techniques Rabi had developed in Stern's laboratory. Together they proved that the sodium atom has four "hyperfine-structure" energy levels, which unambiguously fixed the "spin angular momentum" of its nucleus at a definite value, equal to 3/2 in units of 2p/h.
A few years later, by using beams of atomic hydrogen and deuterium, Rabi and his coworkers confirmed the surprisingly large value for the magnetic moment of the proton which Stern had found in 1933.
In 1937 Rabi achieved the rank of full professor at Columbia. Three years later he became associate director of the radiation laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), recently established to develop microwave radar and related equipment for military uses. This work, which was closely related to Rabi's past researches and which relied heavily on British contributions, was eminently successful.
Rabi was executive officer of the physics department at Columbia (1945 - 1948), during which time he increased the strength of the department, especially in high-energy and microwave physics. He was also instrumental in establishing the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island in 1945, and he started the movement that resulted in the large high-energy laboratory (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland.
He was the chairman of the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission and served on the President's Science Advisory Committee and the United Nations Science Committee. One of Rabi's most satisfying postwar achievements was his organization of a number of international United Nations Conferences on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy.
Like most physicists, he was deeply impressed by the awesome destructive power of the atomic bomb and worked unrelentingly to find means to ensure that the bomb would never be used again.
Communication is essential to understanding, and understanding is essential to unity: this was a major theme in Rabi's life, especially after the war. It applies not only to countries but also to intellectual disciplines.
Granted his sincere search for unity, it is not surprising that Rabi, after holding the Higgins professorship of physics for seven years (1957 - 1964), became the first university professor at Columbia. This professorship is without ties to any particular department.
The last subject Rabi lectured on before his retirement in 1967 was "The Philosophical and Social Implications of 20th Century Physics. " Rabi explained to his Columbia students, in reference to atomic weapons, "just because we got their first doesn't mean that we should have the power of life and death over the whole world. "
Rabi died of a long-term illness on January 11, 1988 in New York City.
In the course of his life, Rabi received many honors in addition to the Nobel Prize. These included the Elliott Cresson Medal from the Franklin Institute in 1942, the Medal for Merit and the King's Medal for Service in the Cause of Freedom from Great Britain in 1948, the officer in the French Legion of Honour in 1956, Columbia University's Barnard Medal for Meritorious Service to Science in 1960, the Niels Bohr International Gold Medal and the Atoms for Peace Award in 1967, the Oersted Medal from the American Association of Physics Teachers in 1982, the Four Freedoms Award from the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute and the Public Welfare Medal from the National Academy of Sciences in 1985, and the Vannevar Bush Award from the National Science Foundation in 1986. He was a Fellow of the American Physical Society, serving as its president in 1950, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was internationally recognized with membership in the Japan Academy and the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, and in 1959 was appointed a member of the Board of Governors of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.
For his atomic-and molecularbeam work and for his discovery of the resonance method, Rabi was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1940 and received the 1944 Nobel Prize.
In 1948 he received the United States Medal of Merit and the King's Medal for Service in the Cause of Freedom for his wartime efforts.
It was during the course of this work that Rabi developed still another new method, the resonance method, that has since become the basis for all precision atomic-and molecular-beam measurements. From the point of view of "pure physics, " perhaps the most important measurements that have been made by exploiting Rabi's method have been those on the anomalous magnetic moment of the electron, the quadrupole moment of the deuteron, and the Lamb shift in hydrogen (which has become of great importance for the development of quantum electrodynamics). From the point of view of "practicality, " Rabi's method has found numerous applications, for example, in the highly precise time measurements associated with "atomic clocks, " in precise measurements of magnetic fields, and in the development of the laser, an exceedingly important and versatile instrument.
Quotations:
Rabi later said:
"I never forgave Truman for buckling under the pressure. He simply did not understand what it was about. As a matter of fact, after he stopped being President he still didn't believe that the Russians had a bomb in 1949. He said so. So for him to have alerted the world that we were going to make a hydrogen bomb at a time when we didn't even know how to make one was one of the worst things he could have done. It shows the dangers of this sort of thing. "
Many witnesses supported Oppenheimer, but none more forcefully than Rabi:
"So it didn't seem to me the sort of thing that called for this kind of proceeding. .. against a man who has accomplished what Dr. Oppenheimer has accomplished. There is a real positive record. .. We have an A-bomb and a whole series of it, and we have a whole series of super bombs, and what more do you want, mermaids?"
Rabi wrote, "is for his science to be understood, to become an integral part of our general culture, to be given proper weight in the cultural and practical affairs of the world. Like the poet, the scientist would rather be read than praised. "
"What the scientist really desires, " according to Rabi, what people of all disciplines sorely require is wisdom: "Without it, knowledge is dry, almost unfit for human consumption, and dangerous in application. .. . Wisdom makes itself most manifest in the application of knowledge to human needs. "
In 1926 he married Helen Newmark. The couple had two daughters.
