- Person
- Isidor Isaac Rabi
- Lived
- 1898–1988
- Field
- Physics
- From
- Polish-born American
The story
Isidor Isaac Rabi was born in 1898 in Rymanów, Galicia, then part of Austria-Hungary, into an Orthodox Jewish family, and was brought to New York as an infant. He grew up in a Yiddish-speaking home on the Lower East Side and later in Brownsville, Brooklyn, where his family ran a grocery store. After studying chemistry at Cornell and earning a doctorate in physics at Columbia in 1927, he spent two years in Europe working with leading physicists including Arnold Sommerfeld, Niels Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg and Otto Stern, whose molecular beam experiments in Hamburg fascinated him.
Back at Columbia from 1929, Rabi built a Molecular Beam Laboratory that sent narrow beams of atoms and molecules through magnetic fields to study the tiny magnets inside atomic nuclei. With Gregory Breit he developed the Breit–Rabi equation, and with Victor Cohen he built an apparatus that measured the nuclear spin of sodium. Talented young physicists flocked to the laboratory, among them Sidney Millman, Jerrold Zacharias, Polykarp Kusch, Jerome Kellogg, Norman Ramsey and Julian Schwinger.
At the suggestion of the physicist C. J. Gorter, the team added an oscillating field to the apparatus. In 1937 Rabi, Kusch, Millman and Zacharias used the new method to measure the magnetic moments of several lithium compounds. NobelPrize.org explains that the apparatus produced electromagnetic oscillations matching the natural precession frequency of atoms in a magnetic field, and that this ingenious use of resonance let Rabi detect single rotational states of atoms and molecules and measure the mechanical and magnetic moments of nuclei with great precision.
This was the birth of nuclear magnetic resonance. Rabi received the 1944 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his resonance method for recording the magnetic properties of atomic nuclei", and the technique quickly became an essential tool in nuclear physics and chemistry. Several of his colleagues later won Nobel Prizes of their own: Kusch in 1955 for measuring the magnetic moment of the electron, and Ramsey in 1989 for a refinement of the resonance method used in atomic clocks.
Rabi's method lies at the root of technologies used every day. It led to the atomic clocks that keep time for satellite navigation and to magnetic resonance imaging, which lets doctors see inside the human body without surgery or X-rays.
Why it matters
Magnetic resonance became one of science's most versatile techniques, used to identify molecules, keep time and look inside the human body.
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 helped found Brookhaven National LaboratoryIsidor Isaac Rabi and Norman Ramsey rallied nine universities to found Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, established in 1947.
- 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.
- 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
- Isidor Isaac Rabi – Biographical NobelPrize.org
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.