Favorite Scientific Biography: Rabi

Back in around 1988, when I started graduate school, I decided to subscribe to a weekly science news magazine which I have now forgotten its name. Inside each issue was an advertisement to join a science book club that I could not resist. Upon joining this book club you get a complimentary book.

One day in the mail I received a biography about Isidor Rabi called Rabi: Scientist and Citizen by John Rigden as my complimentary book. I had no idea who Rabi was and was not really interested in the book. So it sat on my shelf for several years then one day I decided to read the book.

It has ever since been my favorite biography about a scientist and has not been displaced after all these years.

Some highlights of I.I. Rabi incredible life and influential work:

• One of the first to apply the Schrodinger wave equation to the symmetric top which is a common model for molecular spectroscopy.
• Visited Europe in the last 1920s and learned from Bohr, Sommerfeld, Pauli, Stern, Heisenberg, and more.
  
• Was considered a theorist but lead experimental work for most of his career.
• Did extremely accurate molecular beam experiments.
• Designed and lead the first nuclear magnetic resonance methods.
• Measured accurately the proton and deuteron magnetic moments.
• Discovered that the deuteron has a quadrupole moment which changed the whole picture of the nucleus.
• Worked at the Rad Lab on war time radar
• Was consultant to Los Alamos and Oppenheimer during the WWII.
• Was present at the Trinity test.
  
• Won the Nobel Prize in 1944 "for his resonance method for recording the magnetic properties of atomic nuclei."
• Proposed the atomic clock.
• Contributed to the discovery of the intrinsic moment of the electron.

There was so much more to Rabi than I have listed here. I highly recommend this biography that is hard to put down once you get started.


Rabi, Scientist and Citizen (Google Books)