Time to Leave the House

The short (5 ft. 4 in.), white-haired professor perched on a small stool, his feet hooked in the lower rung, his hands extracting scrawled lecture notes from a manila envelope. Isidor Isaac Rabi (rhymes with Bobby) gazed stolidly up at his 30 selected students in Columbia University's tiered, 286-seat Pupin physics lecture hall. His eyes suddenly wrinkled with laughter, self-inspired by a quick quip; then his voice turned passionate as he summed up his lifetime concern that science "should be the foundation for the community of man."

On that theme, Physicist Rabi, 68, who was born in the old Austro-Hungarian empire, grew up in New York's Lower East Side and went on from a Ph.D. at Columbia University to become one of the nation's pioneer nuclear researchers, ended 37 years of teaching at Columbia. A 1944 Nobel prizewinner, Rabi developed the molecular--beam magnetic--resonance theories that laid the foundation for microwave radar, lasers, masers and modern radio astronomy. He was a consultant to the Manhattan Project that built the first atom bomb, and was one of the men responsible for creating the famed Brookhaven National Laboratory. Rabi also helped make Columbia's physics department one of the best in the entire world.

No Absolutes. Despite his extraordinary scientific prestige, Rabi always shunned public attention. At Columbia, he was regarded as a witty, patient teacher deeply concerned with humanizing the austere and arcane formulas of science. Fittingly, his last class as one of Columbia's few University Professors, who have the freedom to teach whatever they wish, was on "The Philosophical and Social Implications of 20th Century Physics." His students, drawn from many disciplines, listened intently. "Science, unlike theology," Rabi argued, "questions its own bases all along. It is a developing thing and, of itself, is revolutionary. And, as such, it particularly fits our time." He noted how early 19th century scientists thought that Newtonian mechanics explained everything, how early 20th century scientists saw quantum mechanics as all-encompassing, how the ever unraveling discoveries of nuclear physics forever destroyed absolutes in science. "Science," he said, "is like one of those old English country houses which is never finished, is continually being added on to."

World War II, said Rabi, was a "blind, black reaction against all that science stood for--against all that meant human advance and progress and understanding." Yet Rabi had no hesitation about pushing ahead with the atomic bomb. "We all felt we were in a race," he said. "And we shuddered to think what would happen if the other side won." Only after the war did Rabi worry about the fact that the U.S. was left with "a power that no nation on earth should have." Rabi spent much of his nonteaching time after that in pushing ardently for world disarmament, organized the first international conference on atomic energy in 1955. He considers this meeting "the beginning of the detente," since it was the place where "We first began to understand Russian scientists as human beings." Yet, said Rabi sadly, "I've not been very successful--the arms race continues and mounts."

Science, Rabi explained, should not be taught merely to enable men to perform specific functions. It is, he argued, "the only valid underlying knowledge that gives guidance to the whole human adventure. Those who are not acquainted with science do not possess the basic human values that are necessary in our time." Science, he went on, "is the real basis for knowing what the hell we are all about" and thus must always be taught with a sense of its social implications. As he closed his last lecture, Rabi's students stood and applauded for five minutes.

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