In 1988, a few months before he died, when Isidor Isaac Rabi’s physicians carefully placed him inside the bore of a Magnetic Resonance Imaging machine, Rabi saw a distorted picture of his face on the cylindrical surface around him. “It was eerie,” Rabi said. “I saw myself in that machine. I never thought my work would come to this.” Rabi died six months short of his ninetieth birthday; at this time, he was widely regarded as the dean of global physics.
Rabi was born in 1898 in the Austro-Hungarian empire, which is now Poland, into a conservative Jewish family with a humble background. When he came upon a library book that described the Copernican theory of planetary motion, Rabi’s first thought was, “Who needs God?” Rabi never practised religion as an adult; however, his religious background did affect his approach to physics.
His family moved him to the United States in 1899, where he received his early schooling in New York City. He received his Bachelor of Chemistry degree from Cornell University in 1919. For three years, Rabi had nothing to do with physics. He spent time “fooling around” with his three friends. Finally, he decided to pursue post-graduate studies at Cornell again, only to realise that Chemistry did not capture his interest.
In 1923, he transferred to Columbia’s physics department. He earned his Ph.D. in 1927 for research on the magnetic characteristics of crystals. Aided by fellowships, he spent two years in Europe, working with Arnold Sommerfeld, Niels Henrik Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli, Otto Stern, and Werner Heisenberg at various periods.
Heisenberg suggested Rabi to Columbia University, where he was hired in 1929. Quantum mechanics was novel and mysterious at the time, and Rabi introduced new physics to Columbia.
Rabi was a poor instructor in the classroom. He was disorganised, and consequently, he was often perplexed by little things. Former students say that after Rabi’s lectures finished, they hurried from their seats and went to the library, looking for resources to help them comprehend what Rabi had been discussing. Rabi’s allure stemmed in part from the way he approached physics.
“I know other ways to have fun. Physics has a much deeper emotional quality for me than that.” Performing physics was like “walking the path of God”, and exceeding in physics was like “wrestling with the Champ.” While he was not a practising Jew, the God metaphor impacted the questions he asked of Nature and led to the cutting-edge physical study he undertook. “Does it bring you close to God?” he would ask his former students, who would describe their research to him.
Rabi had a unique approach to physics; it came naturally to him. “He appears to ride around on the electrons within the atom or asks the question: “If I were an electron, what would I do? Possibly, through sheer force of character, he gets the electron to do just that,” one of Rabi’s postdoctoral fellows had said, describing him. Rabi, guided by his intuition, devised tests that encouraged atomic nuclei to disclose their innermost secrets and then displayed the findings in a charmingly simple manner.
Rabi’s molecular beam techniques, developed during the 1930s, culminated in the development of the magnetic resonance method in 1938. After WWII, Edward F. Purcell at Harvard and Felix Bloch at Stanford expanded the magnetic resonance technique to bulk matter, and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) became a workhorse for physical and chemical research.
Later, Rabi’s discovery was expanded to Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), a potent medical diagnostic tool currently used in medical facilities all over the globe. Albert Einstein, Wolfgang Pauli, and Enrico Fermi were among those who nominated Rabi for the Nobel Prize. Rabi was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1944 for his discovery of magnetic resonance.
When World War II broke out, Rabi was disturbed by the events in Europe. Rabi was able to assist the war effort because of the magnetron, which was created in England. The magnetron, a source of microwave radiation with a 10-cm wavelength, was immediately recognised as a critical component required for small radar systems.
On October 6, 1940, the new magnetron was demonstrated at Bell Laboratories, five months after Rabi’s article on the quadrupole moment of the deuteron was published in Physical Review. A month after witnessing the magnetron’s performance, Rabi dropped everything at Columbia and moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to begin his five-year stint at the MIT Radiation Laboratory, where he led the development of radars for aircraft and ships. Rabi was promoted to assistant director of research and director of the laboratory.
The Manhattan Project began in 1942, and the director, J. Robert Oppenheimer, was no stranger to Rabi. They were longtime friends and even shared a deep respect for one another. When Oppenheimer agreed to hand over management of the Manhattan Project to the military, Rabi approached him and warned him that such a step would be a mistake. Physicists would not accept military instructions and could not operate via a chain of command. Oppenheimer altered his ideas, and the Los Alamos Laboratory remained under civilian hands.
Oppenheimer had recruited Rabi with an associate directorship of the Los Alamos laboratory. Rabi declined but became a senior advisor to Oppenheimer. Rabi was sure that the radar project would have a larger effect on the outcome of the war than a nuclear weapon, the creation of which was far from guaranteed in 1942. He was right, “Radar won the war; the bomb ended the war.”
Nuclear energy manifested in fission weapons of mass destruction cast a shadow over the postwar globe. Rabi, along with Oppenheimer, went on to become a spokesperson for the peaceful use of nuclear energy. Oppenheimer headed the Science Advisory Committee (SAC), and Rabi was a member of it. They were adamantly opposed to the development of fusion bombs, which had an infinite potential for devastation.
Later, in 1957, Rabi became the chairman of the SAC. He used his friendship with President Dwight D. Eisenhower, developed during Eisenhower’s brief tenure as president of Columbia University, to change the SAC to the PSAC, the President’s Science Advisory Committee. It now reported directly to the president.
Rabi was convinced that science might be a force for good. Rabi’s leadership resulted in the establishment of Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, New York, shortly after the war. Based on this experience, he subsequently worked as a United States representative via UNESCO to establish the European laboratory CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.
Rabi’s goal was to bring physicists from various European nations together at CERN and, via joint study, create friendships amongst experts from different countries. CERN continues to be a global hub for fundamental research.
In 1953, Eisenhower galvanised the United Nations delegates to put nuclear energy under international control. As the world’s leading nuclear power, this meant that the United States would essentially relinquish its position as leader. Rabi addressed the Fourth International Conference in 1971 at the United Nations.
“Real peace means more than the absence of violent war. To fulfil human expectations, peace must be a condition which permits the release of the latent creative energies of all people to the end of enhancing and elevating the quality of human life on this globe.”
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