Discoverer of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance
in Molecular Beams
It was lack of economic opportunity in Eastern Europe's Austro-Hungarian Empire that brought Isidor I. Rabi to the United States in 1902 at the age of three. His father, unskilled for a specific trade and lacking formal education, was the first to come to America. Finding employment as a worker in one of Manhattan's garment district sweatshops, David Rabi was eventually able to arrange passage for his wife and son. With hard work and a loan from other Jewish immigrants, he was soon able to open a small grocery store. In time, the Rabi family was able to escape the tenements of the Lower East Side and find a degree of upward mobility in the "far reaches of Brooklyn." It was there, in a small public library, that young Isidor Isaac Rabi first discovered the Copernican view of the solar system, a cosmological perspective that launched him into a lifelong search for scientific understanding. That search eventually led him to the discovery of magnetic resonance in molecular beams and the 1944 Nobel Prize in physics.
This page is located originally at http://www.hungary.org/~hipcat/nobel.htm
