Rabi was born in the town of
Rymanow, in what is now Poland, in 1898 with the name Israel Issac Rabi. His parents immigrated to New York and during the public school enrollment, a school official mistakenly wrote down his name as Isidor, not Israel , which is how Rabi received the distinction of being renamed by the New York public school system. Rabi kept the name.
Rabi entered Cornell University in 1916 with the intention of becoming an engineer, but after taking a chemistry course in qualitative analysis, he switched to chemistry, in which he graduated in 1919. Unable to find steady work, he returned to Cornell in 1922 as a graduate student and then to Columbia in 1923 after having failed to receive a fellowship at Cornell. At Cornell, he found he had taken all the available chemistry courses, so he enrolled in physics, where he made perhaps his first scientific discovery:
"I soon realized that the part of chemistry I liked was called physics. If someone had pointed that out to me before, it would have saved me many, many years."
In 1927, Rabi decided he must go to Europe to hopefully work for Schrödinger, but ultimately, ended up working for
Otto Stern. Stern was famous, because he and Walter Gerlach had in 1922 performed one of the truly classic experiments of physics -- the
Stern Gerlach experiment, whose result was ultimately interpreted as showing the electron has an intrinsic angular momentum, or spin. The time spent with Stern was useful. Originally, Rabi had only wanted to do theoretical work, but Stern forced him to learn something about molecular beam experiments, and it was this knowledge that he later used to develop his method of
Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, for which he received the Nobel Prize. His resonance method was developed only as a method to measure the magnetic moment of the nucleus of the atom, which was an open problem for most nuclei in those days. However, the technique turned out to have widespread applications to both chemistry and medicine, and is an example of how pure research can have great practical applications.