Isidor Isaac Rabi:walking the path of God

Abstract

A few months before Isidor Isaac Rabi died in early 1988, his doctors watched as he was gently moved into the bore of a magnetic-resonance-imaging machine. Once inside the machine, Rabi saw a distorted image of his face in the cylindrical surface surrounding him. "It was eerie," Rabi said. "I saw myself in that machine. I never thought my work would come to this." An eerie moment? Certainly – since Rabi's physical research led directly to magnetic resonance imaging, a technique that is widely used in hospitals today.