Isidor Isaac Rabi

I think physicists are the Peter Pans of the human race. They never grow up, and they keep their curiosity.

Isidor Isaac Rabi, born Israel Isaac Rabi, (July 29, 1898 – January 11, 1988) was an American physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1944 for his discovery of nuclear magnetic resonance, which is used in magnetic resonance imaging. He was also one of the first scientists in the United States to work on the cavity magnetron, which is used in microwave radar and microwave ovens.

Quotes

• 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.
  • As quoted in "Great Minds Start With Questions" in Parents Magazine (September 1993).

• I think physicists are the Peter Pans of the human race. They never grow up, and they keep their curiosity.
  • As quoted in "The Atomic Scientists, the Sense of Wonder and the Bomb" by Mark Fiege in Enviornmental History, Vol. 12, Issue 3 (July 2007).

• What more do you want, mermaids?
  • In defense of Robert Oppenheimer at McCarthy-era security hearings, after noting he had organized scientists to develop the atomic bomb for the US, as quoted in "Atomised" in The New Statesman' (10 January 2008).

• Who ordered *that*?
  • In response to news that the recently discovered Muon was not the Hadron which theorists had predicted, but a new and entirely unexpected type of Lepton.