Isidor Isaac Rabi

Isidor Isaac Rabi (July 29, 1898 – January 11, 1988) was a Galician-born physicist, and Nobel laureate.

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• [He gave us the atom bomb]; what more do you want, mermaids?
  • In defense of Robert Oppenheimer
  • Atomised

• My mother made me a scientist without ever intending to. Every other Jewish mother in Brooklyn would ask her child after school: So? Did you learn anything today? But not my mother. “Izzy,” she would say, “did you ask a good question today?” That difference—asking good questions—made me become a scientist.
  • Quoted in “Great Minds Start With Questions,” Parents Magazine (September 1993)

• I think physicists are the Peter Pans of the human race. They never grow up, and they keep their curiosity.
  • (re)Quoted in The atomic scientists, the sense of wonder, and the bomb. Mark Fiege