Isidor Isaac Rabi - Later Life

Later Life

In 1945 Rabi delivered the Richtmyer Memorial Lecture, held by the American Association of Physics Teachers in honor of Floyd K. Richtmyer, wherein he proposed that the magnetic resonance of atoms might be used as the basis of a clock. William L. Laurence wrote it up for the New York Times, under the headline "'Cosmic pendulum' for clock planned". Before long Zacharias and Ramsey had built such atomic clocks. Rabi actively pursued his research into magnetic resonance until about 1960, but he continued to make appearances at conferences and seminars until his death.

Rabi chaired Columbia's physics department from 1945 to 1949, during which time it was home to two Nobel Laureates (Rabi and Enrico Fermi) and eleven future laureates, including seven faculty (Polykarp Kusch, Willis Lamb, Maria Goeppert-Mayer, James Rainwater, Norman Ramsey, Charles Townes and Hideki Yukawa), a research scientist (Aage Bohr), a visiting professor (Hans Bethe), a doctoral student (Leon Lederman) and an undergrad (Leon Cooper). When Columbia created the rank of University Professor in 1964, Rabi was the first to receive such a chair. This meant that he was free to research or teach whatever he chose. He retired from teaching in 1967 but remained active in the department and held the title of University Professor Emeritus and Special Lecturer until his death. A special chair was named after him in 1985.

A legacy of the Manhattan Project was the network of national laboratories, but none was located on the East Coast. Rabi and Ramsey assembled a group of universities in the New York area to lobby for their own national laboratory. When Zacharias, who was now at MIT, heard about it, he set up a rival group at MIT and Harvard. Rabi had discussions with Groves, who was willing to go along with a new national laboratory, but only one. Moreover, while the Manhattan Project still had funds, the wartime organization was expected to be phased out when a new authority came into existence. After some bargaining and lobbying by Rabi and others, the two groups came together in January 1946. Eventually nine universities (Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, MIT, Princeton, Pennsylvania, Rochester and Yale came together, and on 31 January 1947, a contract was signed with the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), which had replaced the Manhattan Project, that established the Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Rabi suggested to Edoardo Amaldi that Brookhaven might be a model that Europeans could emulate. Rabi saw science as a way of inspiring and uniting a Europe that was still recovering from the war. An opportunity came in 1950 when he was named the United States Delegate to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). At a UNESCO meeting at the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence in June 1950, he called for the establishment of regional laboratories. These efforts bore fruit; in 1952, representatives of eleven countries came together to create the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN). Rabi received a letter from Bohr, Heisenberg, Amaldi and others congratulating him on the success of his efforts. He had the letter framed and hung it on the wall of his home office.

The Atomic Energy Act of 1946 that created the Atomic Energy Commission provided for a nine-man General Advisory Committee (GAC) to advise the Commission on scientific and technical matters. Rabi was one of those appointed in December 1946. The GAC was enormously influential throughout the late 1940s, but in 1950, the GAC unanimously opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb. Rabi went further than most of the other members, and joined Fermi in opposing the hydrogen bomb on moral as well as technical grounds. However, President Harry S. Truman overrode the GAC's advice, and ordered development to proceed. Rabi later said:

I never forgave Truman for buckling under the pressure. He simply did not understand what it was about. As a matter of fact, after he stopped being President he still didn't believe that the Russians had a bomb in 1949. He said so. So for him to have alerted the world that we were going to make a hydrogen bomb at a time when we didn't even know how to make one was one of the worst things he could have done. It shows the dangers of this sort of thing.

Oppenheimer was not reappointed to the GAC when his term expired in 1952, and Rabi succeeded him as chairman, serving until 1956. Rabi later testified on Oppenheimer's behalf at the Atomic Energy Commission's controversial security hearing in 1954 that led to Oppenheimer being stripped of his security clearance. Many witnesses supported Oppenheimer, but none more forcefully than Rabi:

So it didn't seem to me the sort of thing that called for this kind of proceeding ... against a man who has accomplished what Dr. Oppenheimer has accomplished. There is a real positive record ... We have the A-bomb and a whole series of ... what more do you want, mermaids?

Rabi was appointed a member of the Science Advisory Committee (SAC) of the Office of Defense Mobilization in 1952, serving as its chairman from 1956 to 1957. This coincided with the Sputnik crisis. President Dwight Eisenhower met with the SAC on 15 October 1957, to seek advice on possible US responses to the Russians' satellite success. Rabi, who knew Eisenhower from the latter's time as president of Columbia University, was the first to speak, and put forward a series of proposals, one of which was to strengthen the committee so it could provide the President with timely advice. This was done, and the SAC became the President's Science Advisory Committee a few weeks later. He also became Eisenhower's Science Advisor. Rabi served as the US Representative to the NATO Science Committee at the time that the term "software engineering" was coined. While serving in that capacity, he bemoaned the fact that many large software projects were delayed. This prompted discussions that led to the formation of a study group that organized the first conference on software engineering.

In the course of his life, Rabi received many honors in addition to the Nobel Prize. These included: the King's Medal for Service in the Cause of Freedom from Great Britain, officer in the French Legion of Honor, the Medal for Merit, the Niels Bohr International Gold Medal, the Atoms for Peace Award, the Oersted Medal from the American Association of Physics Teachers, the Four Freedoms Award from the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute, the Public Welfare Medal from the National Academy of Sciences, and the Vannevar Bush Award from the National Science Foundation. He was a Fellow of the American Physical Society, serving as its President in 1950, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was internationally recognized with membership of the The Japan Academy and the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, and in 1959 was appointed a member of the Board of Governors of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.

Rabi died at his home in Riverside Drive, Manhattan, from cancer on 11 January 1988. In his last days, he was reminded of his greatest achievement in a poignant fashion when his physicians examined him using magnetic resonance imaging, a technology that had been developed from his ground-breaking research on magnetic resonance. "I saw myself in that machine", he remarked, "I never thought my work would come to this."