Isidor Rabi
 Isidor Rabi    (physicist) | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | Israel Isaac Rabi 1898-07-29 Galicia, Austria-Hungary (Now Poland) |
| Died | 1988-01-11 (Age 89) New York City, New York, U.S. |
| Nationality | American |
| Citizenship | United States |
| Alma mater | Cornell University, Columbia University |
| Interests | Physics |
American physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1944 for his discovery of nuclear magnetic resonance. 1961 Bilderberg.Office of Defense Mobilization. President's Science Advisory Committee. NATO Science Committee. | |
Isidor Isaac Rabi was an American physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1944 for his discovery of nuclear magnetic resonance. Having worked on the Manhattan Project during the war, he was one the first members of the Atomic Energy Commission, then the Science Advisory Committee (SAC) of the Office of Defense Mobilization. SAC later became the President's Science Advisory Committee. Also US Representative to the NATO Science Committee.
Born into a traditional Polish-Jewish family in Rymanów, Galicia, Rabi came to the United States as a baby and was raised in New York's Lower East Side. He entered Cornell University as an electrical engineering student in 1916, but soon switched to chemistry. Later, he became interested in physics. He continued his studies at Columbia University, where he was awarded his doctorate for a thesis on the magnetic susceptibility of certain crystals. In 1927, he headed for Europe, where he met and worked with many of the finest physicists of the time.
In 1929, Rabi returned to the United States, where Columbia offered him a faculty position. In collaboration with Gregory Breit, he developed the Breit–Rabi equation and predicted that the Stern–Gerlach experiment could be modified to confirm the properties of the atomic nucleus. His techniques for using nuclear magnetic resonance to discern the magnetic moment and nuclear spin of atoms earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1944. Nuclear magnetic resonance became an important tool for nuclear physics and chemistry, and the subsequent development of magnetic resonance imaging from it has also made it important to the field of medicine, where it is used in magnetic resonance imaging.
During World War II he worked on radar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Radiation Laboratory (RadLab) and on the Manhattan Project. After the war, he served on the General Advisory Committee (GAC) of the Atomic Energy Commission, and was chairman from 1952 to 1956. He was also on the Science Advisory Committees (SACs) of the Office of Defense Mobilization and the Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory, and was Science Advisor to President Dwight D. Eisenhower. He was involved with the establishment of the Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1946, and later, as United States delegate to UNESCO, with the creation of CERN in 1952. When Columbia created the rank of University Professor in 1964, Rabi was the first to receive that position. A special chair was named after him in 1985. He retired from teaching in 1967 but remained active in the department and held the title of University Professor Emeritus and Special Lecturer until his death.
Military matters
The Atomic Energy Act of 1946 that created the Atomic Energy Commission provided for a nine-man General Advisory Committee (GAC) to advise the Commission on scientific and technical matters. Rabi was one of those appointed in December 1946.[1] The GAC was enormously influential throughout the late 1940s, but in 1950 the GAC unanimously opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb. Rabi went further than most of the other members, and joined Fermi in opposing the hydrogen bomb on moral as well as technical grounds.[2] However, President Harry S. Truman overrode the GAC's advice, and ordered development to proceed.[3] Rabi later said:
I never forgave Truman for buckling under the pressure. He simply did not understand what it was about. As a matter of fact, after he stopped being President he still didn't believe that the Russians had a bomb in 1949. He said so. So for him to have alerted the world that we were going to make a hydrogen bomb at a time when we didn't even know how to make one was one of the worst things he could have done. It shows the dangers of this sort of thing.[4]
Oppenheimer was not reappointed to the GAC when his term expired in 1952, and Rabi succeeded him as chairman, serving until 1956.[5] Rabi later testified on Oppenheimer's behalf at the Atomic Energy Commission's controversial security hearing in 1954 that led to Oppenheimer being stripped of his security clearance. Many witnesses supported Oppenheimer, but none more forcefully than Rabi:
So it didn't seem to me the sort of thing that called for this kind of proceeding... against a man who has accomplished what Dr. Oppenheimer has accomplished. There is a real positive record... We have an A-bomb and a whole series of it, and we have a whole series of super bombs, and what more do you want, mermaids?[6][7]
Rabi was appointed a member of the Science Advisory Committee (SAC) of the Office of Defense Mobilization in 1952, serving as its chairman from 1956 to 1957.[8] This coincided with the Sputnik crisis. President Dwight Eisenhower met with the SAC on October 15, 1957, to seek advice on possible US responses to the Soviet satellite success. Rabi, who knew Eisenhower from the latter's time as president of Columbia, was the first to speak, and put forward a series of proposals, one of which was to strengthen the committee so it could provide the President with timely advice. This was done, and the SAC became the President's Science Advisory Committee a few weeks later. He also became Eisenhower's Science Advisor.[9] In 1956 Rabi attended the Project Nobska anti-submarine warfare conference, where discussion ranged from oceanography to nuclear weapons.[10] He was the US Representative to the NATO Science Committee at the time that the term "software engineering" was coined. While serving in that capacity, he bemoaned the fact that many large software projects were delayed. This prompted discussions that led to the formation of a study group that organized the first conference on software engineering.[11]
Event Participated in
| Event | Start | End | Location(s) | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bilderberg/1961 | 21 April 1961 | 23 April 1961 | Canada Quebec St-Castin | The 10th Bilderberg, the first in Canada and the 2nd outside Europe. |
References
- ↑ Hewlett, Richard G; Anderson, Oscar E. (1962). The New World, 1939–1946. page 648
- ↑ Hewlett, Richard G; Duncan, Francis (1969). Atomic Shield, 1947–1952. A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. pages 380–85
- ↑ Hewlett, Richard G; Duncan, Francis (1969). Atomic Shield, 1947–1952. A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. pages 403-408
- ↑ https://archive.org/details/rabiscientistcit00rigd page 246
- ↑ Hewlett, Richard G; Duncan, Francis (1969). Atomic Shield, 1947–1952. A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. page 665
- ↑ https://archive.org/details/rabiscientistcit00rigd page 227
- ↑ http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2015/01/16/oppenheimer-unredacted-part-ii/
- ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20130722150238/http://www.aip.org/history/acap/institutions/psac.jsp
- ↑ https://archive.org/details/rabiscientistcit00rigd pages 248-51
- ↑ Friedman, Norman (1994). US Submarines Since 1945: An Illustrated Design History. Annapolis, MD: United States Naval Institute. ISBN 1-55750-260-9. OCLC 29477981. pages 109-114
- ↑ https://archive.org/details/mechanizingproof0000mack page 34
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