- Person
- Isidor Isaac Rabi
- Lived
- 1898–1988
- Field
- Physics
- From
- Polish-born American
The story
The Manhattan Project left the United States with a network of national laboratories, but none of them was on the East Coast. After the Second World War, physicists returning to universities in the north-east wanted access to the large, expensive machines that frontier research now required, such as nuclear reactors and particle accelerators, and no single university could afford them.
Isidor Isaac Rabi, the Columbia physicist who had just been awarded the 1944 Nobel Prize, and his former student Norman Ramsey assembled a group of universities in the New York area to lobby for a laboratory of their own. Both men drew on their wartime experience at the MIT Radiation Laboratory, where scientists from many institutions had worked side by side. When Jerrold Zacharias, now at MIT, set up a rival group with Harvard, Rabi negotiated with General Leslie Groves, the head of the Manhattan Project, who was willing to support one new laboratory but only one. After bargaining and lobbying, the two groups joined forces in January 1946.
Eventually nine institutions came together: Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, MIT, Princeton, Pennsylvania, Rochester and Yale. On 31 January 1947 they signed a contract with the new Atomic Energy Commission to establish Brookhaven National Laboratory, on the site of Camp Upton, a former army base on Long Island. Ramsey became the first head of its physics department. NobelPrize.org describes Brookhaven as an organisation devoted to research into the peaceful uses of atomic energy, and the Atomic Heritage Foundation lists Rabi as a co-founder.
Brookhaven grew quickly. Its graphite research reactor, opened in 1950, was the first built in the United States after the war, and in 1952 its Cosmotron became the first accelerator to give a particle more than one billion electron volts of energy. In 1959 it built the first US reactor designed specifically for medical research.
Seven Nobel Prizes have been awarded for work done at Brookhaven, including discoveries of the muon neutrino and the charm quark. Today about 2,750 staff work there, joined by some 4,000 visiting researchers a year, at facilities such as the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and the National Synchrotron Light Source II. Rabi's idea of a shared laboratory also travelled: he suggested to European colleagues that Brookhaven could be a model for them, an idea that fed into the founding of CERN.
Why it matters
Brookhaven has produced discoveries in physics, chemistry and medicine for over seventy years and trained thousands of scientists.
About Isidor Isaac Rabi
Galician-born physicist who discovered nuclear magnetic resonance in molecular beams, won the 1944 Nobel Prize, and helped found Brookhaven and CERN, the root of today’s MRI and atomic clocks.
More about Isidor Isaac Rabi
- Rabi's team found the deuteron is not roundPrecise measurements by Isidor Isaac Rabi's group in the late 1930s showed the deuteron has an electric quadrupole moment, a key clue to the nuclear force.
- Rabi helped create the President's science advisersAfter Sputnik in 1957, Isidor Isaac Rabi's advice to President Eisenhower helped create the President's Science Advisory Committee.
- I. I. Rabi discovered how to make atomic nuclei 'ring'In 1937 Isidor Isaac Rabi's Columbia team invented the molecular-beam magnetic resonance method, winning him the 1944 Nobel Prize in Physics.
- Rabi led research on wartime microwave radarAt MIT's Radiation Laboratory during the Second World War, Isidor Isaac Rabi led research that pushed radar to sharper 3-centimetre wavelengths.
- I. I. Rabi opposed the hydrogen bomb on moral groundsIn 1949 Isidor Isaac Rabi joined Enrico Fermi on the AEC's advisory committee in opposing the hydrogen bomb on moral as well as technical grounds.
- I. I. Rabi planted the idea that became CERNAt a UNESCO meeting in Florence in June 1950, Isidor Isaac Rabi called for regional laboratories to rebuild European science; in 1952 European nations created CERN’s provisional council.
- I. I. Rabi proposed the atomic clock in 1945In a 1945 lecture Isidor Isaac Rabi proposed using the magnetic resonance of atoms to keep time; his colleagues soon built the first atomic clocks.
- Rabi's discovery is the root of the MRI scannerIsidor Isaac Rabi's magnetic resonance research led to MRI; in his final illness he was examined in a scanner descended from his own experiments.
Sources
- Isidor Isaac Rabi Wikipedia
- Isidor I. Rabi Atomic Heritage Foundation
- Brookhaven National Laboratory Wikipedia
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