Born into a traditional Polish-Jewish family in Rymanów, Galicia, Rabi came to the United States as an infant and was raised in New York's Lower East Side.

During World War II he worked on radar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Radiation Laboratory (RadLab) and on the Manhattan Project.

He retired from teaching in 1967, but remained active in the department and held the title of University Professor Emeritus and Special Lecturer until his death.

Israel Isaac Rabi was born on July 29, 1898, into a Polish-Jewish Orthodox family in Rymanów, Galicia, in what was then part of Austria-Hungary but is now Poland.

The younger Rabi and his mother, Sheindel, joined David there a few months later, and the family moved into a two-room apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

He was awarded his Bachelor of Science degree in June 1919, but since at the time Jews were largely excluded from employment in the chemical industry and academia, he did not receive any job offers.

While his crystals were growing, Rabi read James Clerk Maxwell's 1873 A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, which inspired an easier method.

The paper attracted little fanfare in academic circles, although it was read by Kariamanickam Srinivasa Krishnan, who used the method in his own investigations of crystals.

With Ralph Kronig, Francis Bitter, Mark Zemansky and others, he set out to extend the Schrödinger equation to symmetric top molecules and find the energy states of such a mechanical system.

On reaching Zürich, where he hoped to work for Erwin Schrödinger, he met two fellow Americans, Julius Adams Stratton and Linus Pauling.

[13] On Wills' advice, Rabi traveled to Leeds for the 97th annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, where he heard Werner Heisenberg present a paper on quantum mechanics.

After Bohr returned in October, he arranged for Rabi and Yoshio Nishina to continue their work with Wolfgang Pauli at the University of Hamburg.

Rabi soon made friends with them, and became interested in their molecular beam experiments,[15] for which Stern would receive the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1943.

Rabi devised a method of using a uniform field instead, with the molecular beam at a glancing angle, so the atoms would be deflected like light through a prism.

Heisenberg departed for a tour of the United States in March 1929, so Rabi and Oppenheimer decided to go to the ETH Zurich, where Pauli was now the professor of physics.

[26] Between his teaching duties and his family, he had little time for research, and published no papers in his first year at Columbia, but was nonetheless promoted to assistant professor at its conclusion.

In collaboration with Gregory Breit, he developed the Breit-Rabi equation, and predicted that the Stern–Gerlach experiment could be modified to confirm the properties of the atomic nucleus.

[30] Rabi's Molecular Beam Laboratory began to attract others, including Sidney Millman, a graduate student who studied lithium for his doctorate.

[31][32] Another was Jerrold Zacharias who, believing that the sodium nucleus would be too difficult to understand, proposed studying the simplest of the elements, hydrogen.

[34] Other scientists whose careers began at the Molecular Beam Laboratory included Norman Ramsey, Julian Schwinger, Jerome Kellogg and Polykarp Kusch.

[44][45][46] This discovery meant that the physical shape of the deuteron was not symmetric, which provided valuable insight into the nature of the nuclear force binding nucleons.

[48] That month, the British Tizard Mission brought a number of new technologies to the United States, including a cavity magnetron, a high-powered device that generates microwaves using the interaction of a stream of electrons with a magnetic field.

The scientists working on Trinity set up a betting pool on the yield of the test, with predictions ranging from total dud to 45 kilotons of TNT equivalent (kt).

[59] Rabi actively pursued his research into magnetic resonance until about 1960, but he continued to make appearances at conferences and seminars until his death.

[60][61] Rabi chaired Columbia's physics department from 1945 to 1949, during which time it was home to two Nobel laureates (Rabi and Enrico Fermi) and eleven future laureates, including seven faculty (Polykarp Kusch, Willis Lamb, Maria Goeppert-Mayer, James Rainwater, Norman Ramsey, Charles Townes and Hideki Yukawa), a research scientist (Aage Bohr), a visiting professor (Hans Bethe), a doctoral student (Leon Lederman) and an undergraduate (Leon Cooper).

Rabi had discussions with Major General Leslie R. Groves Jr., the director of the Manhattan Project, who was willing to go along with a new national laboratory, but only one.

Eventually nine universities (Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, MIT, Princeton, Pennsylvania, Rochester and Yale) came together, and on January 31, 1947, a contract was signed with the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), which had replaced the Manhattan Project, that established the Brookhaven National Laboratory.

These efforts bore fruit; in 1952, representatives of eleven countries came together to create the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN or European Organization for Nuclear Research).

[77] In 1956 Rabi attended the Project Nobska anti-submarine warfare conference, where discussion ranged from oceanography to nuclear weapons.

[27] The most valuable of Columbia University's undergraduate research scholarships, designed to motivate and support promising young scientists, is named after him,[86] so is the street, Route Rabi at CERN, on the Prévessin site in France.