Isidor Isaac Rabi (29 July 1898-11 January 1988) was Chairman of the President's Science Advisory Committee from 1956 to 1957.
Biography[]
Isidor Isaac Rabi was born in Rymanow, Galicia, Austria-Hungary (present-day Subcarpathian Voivodeship, Poland) in 1898 to a traditional Jewish family, and he came to the United States as an infant and was raised in New York City's Lower East Side. Rabi studied at Cornell and Columbia, initially studying chemistry before switching to physics. Rabi went to Europe from 1927 to 1929, befriending J. Robert Oppenheimer in the process. During World War II, he worked on radar at the MIT Radiation Laboratory and on Oppenheimer's Manhattan Project, although he was initially reluctant to help develop weapons of mass destruction; Oppenheimer persuaded him to lend his aid by reminding him that Nazi Germany would acquire an atomic bomb if America did not do so first. After the war, Rabi worked for the Atomic Energy Commission, the Office of Defense Mobilization, the Ballistic Research Laboratory, and as science advisor to President Dwight D. Eisenhower. After the war, he established the Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1946 and CERN in 1952 while serving as the US delegate to UNESCO. He became Columbia's inaugural University Professor in 1964, and he retired from teaching in 1967 and remained active in the department until his death in 1988. In 1986, speaking as a "lifelong Republican", he criticized Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars" program and accused his administration of lying to the people.