NEW YORK — Isidor Isaac Rabi, a pioneer in exploring the atom and a major force in 20th Century physics, died Monday at his Manhattan home after a long illness. He was 89.
Mr. Rabi, who won the 1944 Nobel Prize in physics, was a strong intellectual influence on succeeding generations of physicists and a moral influence in the debate over controlling the power of the atom. The center for physics that he established at Columbia University became a training ground for scientists who went on to establish other major centers.
He was awarded the Nobel Prize for developing a method of measuring the magnetic properties of atoms, molecules and atomic nuclei. His work in turn made possible the precise measurements necessary for the development of the atomic clock, the laser, the maser and diagnostic scanning of the human body by nuclear magnetic resonance.
Known as I.I. Rabi to his students at Columbia, and as Rab to his wife and friends, he was born July 29, 1898, in the town of Rymanow, Austria-Hungary. He was a baby when his parents moved to New York. His father was a tailor who at times could not get work.
``It`s a miracle,`` Mr. Rabi said years later, ``how a sickly child from a lower east side poverty-stricken family moved in one generation to where I did. Had we stayed in Europe, I probably would have become a tailor.``
Fellow scientists admired what they called his ``street smarts`` and came to regard him as a conscience of their community. He devoted much of his life to channeling knowledge of the forces of the atom to peaceful purposes. He was the originator of the idea for the European Center for Nuclear Research in Geneva, which was instrumental in the rebirth of science in postwar Europe.
In this country he played a major role in the creation and style of the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island. He devoted a great deal of his energy to reforming science education in the United States and ending the isolation of science from the humanities.
To Mr. Rabi, physics was the most ennobling of disciplines, as well as the most fundamental. He said he had always tried to impart to his students a certain point of view of physics, its greatness. ``You`re wrestling with a champ,`` he recalled telling them. ``You`re trying to find out how God made the world, just like Jacob wrestling with the angel.``
Although most of his pure scientific research was over by the 1940s, he was a major force in the world of 20th Century science. Sidney Drell, the theoretical physicist, described him as ``a very great giant on the scientific scene.``
He also cited ``his clear speaking out on the deep moral issues``
involving nuclear weapons.
In World War II, Mr. Rabi was a leader of the research team in Cambridge, Mass., that helped in the development of radar. He also served as a senior adviser on the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb, and later as a science adviser to President Dwight Eisenhower.