If you’ve ever had an MRI, you can thank Isidor Isaac Rabi (1898-1988). Rabi, a Polish Jew who emigrated with his family to New York as an infant, won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1944 for the creation of molecular-beam magnetic-resonance detection, the discovery that would become the foundation for magnetic resonance imaging. Rabi also worked on the Manhattan Project and was standing next to J. Robert Oppenheimer for the detonation of the world’s first nuclear explosion at the Trinity test site in July 1945. Advertisement Long before that, when Rabi came home from grade school one day in...