- Person
- Isidor Isaac Rabi
- Lived
- 1898–1988
- Field
- Physics
- From
- Polish-born American
The story
After the Second World War, European physics was exhausted. The continent was still recovering from the war, and no single European country could afford the large accelerators that frontier research now needed. In the United States, by contrast, Isidor Isaac Rabi had just helped nine universities pool their resources to found Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island.
Rabi saw science as a way of inspiring and uniting a Europe still rebuilding from the war, and he suggested to the Italian physicist Edoardo Amaldi that Brookhaven might be a model Europeans could follow. His opportunity came in 1950, when he was named United States delegate to UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
At a UNESCO meeting in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence in June 1950, Rabi called for the establishment of regional research laboratories in which nations would combine their resources. European scientists took up the idea. In 1952 representatives of eleven countries came together to create a provisional Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, CERN, which worked at first in Copenhagen under the direction of Niels Bohr. The convention establishing the permanent organisation was ratified in 1954 by twelve founding member states, and the laboratory was built near Geneva on the French-Swiss border.
Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Amaldi and others wrote to congratulate Rabi on the success of his efforts, and he framed their letter and hung it in his home office. A street on CERN's Prévessin site in France is named Route Rabi in his honour.
CERN has become the world's largest particle physics laboratory and a model of peaceful scientific cooperation, with 25 member states, including Israel, its only full member from outside geographical Europe. Work there has led to Nobel Prizes for the discovery of the W and Z bosons and for the theory of the Higgs boson, found at CERN's Large Hadron Collider in 2012. In 1989 Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web at CERN, and in 1993 the organisation made it free for everyone to use.
Why it matters
CERN became a model of peaceful international cooperation, discovered the Higgs boson and gave the world the World Wide Web.
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.
- 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 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
- CERN Wikipedia
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.