Rabi: Scientist & Citizen

“Rabi’s voice comes through vividly and forcefully. This is a work of great inspiration.” — Aage Bohr, Professor of Physics, Niels Bohr Institute, Copenhagen, Denmark “This excellent work is the first full biography of Professor Rabi, the scientist who epitomizes the passing of the torch of physics from Europe to the United States almost a half-century ago. As I read this biography it was almost as if Rabi himself were retelling these events so that all can share his memories of those exciting and important years and benefit from his experience and wisdom.” — Rosalyn S. Yalow, Nobel Laureate in Medicine “A delightful book about a delightful man. Rabi always found a simpler way to do any given experiment, and this made him a great physicist. He has now become a sage who has given the most useful advice to all his colleagues.” — Hans A. Bethe, Nobel Laureate in Physics and Professor Emeritus of Physics, Cornell University “A steadily fascinating account of an exemplary life. Rigden gives the lay reader a clear idea of what the physicist is seeing, what leads him to such strange thoughts. His account of ‘The Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer’ gives more useful information in a few pages than I could find in the near thousand-page transcript of the hearings.” — Howard Nemerov, Pulitzer Prize-winning Poet and Professor of English, Washington University “An admirable biography, the best possible replacement for the memoirs that Rabi never found time to write.” McGeorge Bundy, Professor of History, New York University “The twentieth century [was] a time of high adventure in physics. It is no wonder that Rabi, with his ebullience and complex genius and wisdom found his profession ‘wonderful.’ As Rigden demonstrates in this complete and very good book, physics was wonderful for…