Word: rabi
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...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...
Isidor Isaac Rabi, SC.D., Nobel Prize physicist...
...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...
...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...
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...