| Isidor Isaac Rabi  Born: 29-Jul-1898
Birthplace: Rymanów, Poland
Died: 11-Jan-1988
Location of death: New York City
Cause of death: Illness
Gender: Male
Religion: Jewish
Race or Ethnicity: White
Sexual orientation: Straight
Occupation: Physicist Nationality: United States
Executive summary: Magnetic beam resonances In 1937, Isidor Isaac Rabi (pronounced RAH-bee) developed a method to measure the magnetic moments (spin and magnetic characteristics) of atomic nuclei. His technique was fundamental to subsequent atomic beam experiments, leading to development of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in medicine, guidance systems for missiles and satellites, and Rabi's Nobel Prize for Physics in 1944. In 1945 he proposed construction of the first atomic clock, and a founding member of the Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1947, and Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN) in 1954.
He was born in a Polish town that was then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and came to America with his family when he was an infant, where his father found work as a tailor. "Had we stayed in Europe", he later said, "I probably would have become a tailor". Instead he earned a degree in chemistry and worked for several years in an industrial laboratory, before returning to college to study physics.
He was involved in wartime improvements to radar technology, and though he declined Robert Oppenheimer's invitation to work on the Manhattan Project, he visited the Los Alamos laboratory numerous times and provided significant informal advice and valuable troubleshooting expertise. He later explained that he had moral qualms about using the atom as an ultimate weapon, and said he believed that World War II could be won without the bomb. After the war he became an outspoken opponent of atomic weaponry, which he described as "necessarily an evil thing" and "wrong on fundamental ethical principles". Father: David Rabi (tailor)
Mother: Janet Teig
Wife: Helen Newmark (m. 17-Aug-1926, two daughters)
Daughter: Nancy Liehtenstein
Daughter: Margaret Beels
High School: Manual Training High School, Brooklyn, NY
University: BS Chemistry, Cornell University (1919)
University: Cornell University (attended, 1923)
University: PhD Physics, Columbia University (1927)
Lecturer: Theoretical Physics, Columbia University (1929-37)
Professor: Theoretical Physics, Columbia University (1937-40)
Professor: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1940-45)
Professor: Physics, Columbia University (1945-57)
Professor: Higgins Professor of Physics, Columbia University (1957-64)
Scholar: Co-Founder, Brookhaven National Laboratory (1947-67)
Professor: University Professor of Physics, Columbia University (1964-67)
Elliott Cresson Medal 1942
Nobel Prize for Physics 1944
Congressional Order of Merit 1948
King's Medal for Service in the Cause of Freedom 1948
Niels Bohr Gold Medal 1967
Atoms for Peace Award 1967
Oersted Medal 1982
Vannevar Bush Award 1986
French Legion of Honor Officer
US Atomic Energy Commission General Advisory Committee (1946-56)
US Atomic Energy Commission Chairman (1952-56)
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
American Philosophical Society
American Physical Society President, 1950
CERN Founding Member, 1954
National Academy of Sciences
Austrian Ancestry
Hungarian Ancestry
Polish Ancestry
Jewish Ancestry
Naturalized US Citizen
FILMOGRAPHY AS ACTOR
The Day After Trinity (20-Jan-1981) · Himself
Requires Flash 7+ and Javascript.
Do you know something we don't?
Submit a correction or make a comment about this profile
Copyright ©2019 Soylent Communications
| 
