Isidor Isaac Rabi

Isidor Isaac Rabi was an American physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1944 for his resonance method of recording the magnetic properties of atomic nuclei. Born in Rymanow in Austria-Hungary in 1898, he was brought to the United States as an infant, grew up on the Lower East Side of New York and studied at Cornell and Columbia, where he later chaired the physics department and led the Molecular Beam Laboratory. During the Second World War he worked on radar at the MIT Radiation Laboratory and on the Manhattan Project. After the war he sat on the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission and chaired it from 1952 to 1956, helped to found Brookhaven National Laboratory and urged the creation of what became CERN. He received the Atoms for Peace Award in 1967 and died in 1988. He is included here for his part in shaping postwar nuclear science policy.