Rabi : scientist and citizen
When Isidor Isaac Rabi began his career at Columbia University in the 1920s, America was virtually an underdeveloped nation in the world of physics. Today, the United States is pre-eminent in this science, and I. I. Rabi is pre-eminent among American physicists. Even as a boy in the ghettos of Brooklyn and the Lower East Side of New York, Rabi was an American original. Instead of having a traditional Jewish bar mitzvah ceremony, he insisted on marking his coming of age by lecturing family and friends (in Yiddish) on the principle of the electric light bulb. In the 1920s, after immersing himself in the new quantum physics of Europe, Rabi returned to Columbia, where his seminal work on the magnetic proper-ties of the atomic nucleus earned him a Nobel Prize. Where Rabi was, there was American physics. During the Second World War, Rabi played decisive roles in the development of both the atomic bomb and radar. (The former, he believes, ended the war, but the latter won it.) Since then, Rabi's wisdom and humor, his intellectual and moral integrity, have shaped much of the science and statesman-ship of our nuclear age. John S. Rigden, himself a noted physicist, has created an intimate and inspiring portrait of the acknowledged Dean of American Physics.-- Inside jacket flap
Print Book, English, 1987
Basic Books, Inc., New York, 1987