Word: rabi
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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What then was the secret of Edison's inventiveness? The core of it must remain as elusive as the mystery of why Rembrandt handled chiaroscuro so masterfully; it was an inborn gift, honed by practice but unteachable. Nobel-prizewinning Physicist Isidor I. Rabi, for one, maintains that Edison could no more have stopped himself from inventing than a born punster can refrain from playing word games. Robert Conot, author of a 1979 biography of Edison, A Streak of Luck, observes that Edison's mind "multiplied devices from a single idea like a dividing amoeba and then compartmentalized...
Scientists share that adulation, for Einstein was the most eminent among them in this century and, in the eyes of some, the greatest scientist of all time. Says Nobel Laureate I.I. Rabi: "There are few ideas in contemporary physics that did not grow out of his work." Adds M.I.T.'s Irwin Shapiro: "He makes me proud to call myself a physicist...
...because if conventional weapons didn't work, we would use tactical nuclear weapons. When I read that I became very much exercised and I telephoned the two gentlemen, who were science advisors before I was, and chairmen of PSAC under Eisenhower, namely (James) Killian (chairman, MIT Corporation) and (I.I.) Rabi (professor of Physics, Columbia University). They agreed with me that this was a very dangerous thing even to talk about. And we constructed a telegram to ex-President Eisenhower (who was then in Palm Springs) quoting the general and saying that this would be disastrous in its own right...