Rabi, Isidor Isaac
Rabi (RAHB ee), Isidor Isaac (1898 - 1988) an Austrian-born American physicist, was awarded the 1944 Nobel Prize in physics for recording the magnetic properties of atomic nuclei.
In his early work, Rabi investigated the magnetic qualities of crystals. In 1930, he began studying the magnetic properties of atomic nuclei using beams of molecules. Rabi succeeded in detecting and measuring single states of rotation of atoms and molecules. He also determined the mechanical and magnetic moments of the nuclei, the forces causing the electrons to spin around the nucleus of an atom.
Rabi was born in Rymanow, Poland (then part of Austria-Hungary). In 1899, he moved with his family to the United States. He studied chemistry at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and then at Columbia University in New York City. He became professor at Columbia in 1937.
In 1940, he was granted leave from the university to work as associate director of the Radiation Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on the development of radar and the atomic bomb. In 1945, he returned to Columbia University. Rabi was one of the founders of the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York in 1947.
Rabi served as a member of the Science Advisory Committee of the International Atomic Energy Agency. He also helped to organize the first International Conference on Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy, in Geneva, Switzerland in 1955 and served as the United States delegate and Vice-President of the conference.
In 1967, Rabi won the Atoms for Peace Award established by the Ford Motor Company. He also received the Elliott Cresson Medal of the Franklin Institute in 1942, the Pupin Gold Medal of Columbia University 1981, and appointment to the Legion of Honor of France. He was a fellow, and president in 1950, of the American Physical Society and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1985, Columbia honored Rabi by establishing the Isidor Isaac Rabi Chair in Physics.