Rabi: Scientist & Citizen

This is a welcome reissue with a new Preface of John Rigden's stellar biography of I.I. Rabi, one of the most influential physicists of the 20th century. Rabi's discovery of the magnetic resonance method won him the Nobel Prize in 1944 and stimulated research leading to, among other things, refinements in quantum electrodynamics, refined molecular beam methods, radio astronomy with the hydrogen 21-cm line, atomic clocks and solid state lasers.

This biography by the editor of American Review of Physics makes amends for the neglect of a man today esteemed, at 88, as the dean of American physics. Isadore Isaac Rabi rose from Brooklyn-ghetto beginnings to become a key figure among the Americans of the 1920s and '30s who helped shape quantum theory and in doing so made American physics equal to the European scene. Here is a satisfying, sympathetic portrait of a modest, brilliant scientist who regards his calling as "sacred," a religious exploration of "one God," the God being nature. Readers will treasure equally the story of Rabi's molecular-beam experimentswhich earned him the Nobel Prize in 1944and a gallery of revealing glimpses of his scientist friends, chief among them J. Robert Oppenheimer, whose historic role in managing the Manhattan Project overshadowed Rabi's work on radar at MITwhich Rigden pointedly credits with truly winning WW II. Photos.
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