Augustine Pamplany CST

Isidor Isaac Rabi was the son of Jewish Parents David Rabi and Janet Teig, born in Austria, on July 29, 1898. He was raised in the US by his family. He had his Bachelor of Chemistry at Cornell University in New York. He was awarded the Ph.D. for his work on the magnetic properties of crystals. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of nuclear magnetic resonance. This discovery led to the development of the magnetic resonance imaging. He recalls his own experience of undergoing an MRI in 1987, months before his death: “It was eerie. I saw myself in that machine. I never thought my work would come to this.”
In his early school days, he read the Copernican heliocentrism and it led him to atheism. He told his parents, “It’s all very simple… Who needs God?” However, as he advanced in thinking, he became a believer and considered science itself to be a way to God. He writes: “Physics filled me with awe, put me in touch with a sense of original causes. Physics brought me closer to God. That feeling stayed with me throughout my years in science. Whenever one of my students came to me with a scientific project, I asked only one question, ‘Will it bring you nearer to God?’”
Of Science, he said: “To me, science is an expression of the human spirit, which reaches every sphere of human culture. It gives an aim and meaning to existence as well as a knowledge, understanding, love, and admiration for the world. It gives a deeper meaning to morality and another dimension to aesthetics.” He was obsessed with curiosity and the quest for ultimate meaning. He underscores the philosophical and foundational aspects of the quest for meaning in science when he states: “There are questions which illuminate, and there are those that destroy. I was always taught to ask the first kind.” This vision of science is very well captured in his classical remark, “if a man has no feeling for art he is considered narrow-minded, but if he has no feeling for science this is considered quite normal. This is a fundamental weakness.”
Isidor Rabi reminds us of the renowned founding fathers of modern physics like Newton, Einstein, Neils Bohr, etc., who were always in the hunt for the answers to the Big Questions of humanity through science. It was such interdisciplinary curiosity that helped his transition from an atheist to a believer.