I.i. Rabi Quotes

By the end of the decade, America’s stockpile of nuclear weapons would leap from some 300 warheads to nearly 18,000 nuclear weapons. Over the next five decades, the United States would produce more than 70,000 nuclear weapons and spend a staggering $5.5 trillion on nuclear weapons programs. In retrospect—and even at the time—it was clear that the H-bomb decision was a turning point in the Cold War’s spiraling arms race. Like Oppenheimer, Kennan was thoroughly “disgusted.” I. I. Rabi was outraged. “I never forgave Truman,” he said.

All of the lightest stable quarks and leptons have heavier replicas. No one knows why they are there, or what they are good for. When physicists first realized that the muon, a particle first seen in cosmic rays, was nothing other than a heavier version of the electron (200 times heavier), the physicist I.I. Rabi asked, “Who ordered that?

Of the leading men in American physics MIT had three of the best, John C. Slater, Philip M. Morse, and Julius A. Stratton. They came from a more standard mold—gentlemanly, homebred, Christian—than some of the physicists who would soon eclipse them, foreigners like Hans Bethe and Eugene Wigner, who had just arrived at Cornell University and Princeton University, respectively, and Jews like I. I. Rabi and J. Robert Oppenheimer, who had been hired at Columbia University and the University of California at Berkeley, despite anti-Semitic misgivings at both places.