1. When Rabi was a youngster on the sidewalks of New York
He didn't trip fantastics with a maiden named O'Rourke
He palled around with junkmen, goes the story that we hear,
And got himself equipment at a price that wasn't dear.

CHORUS:
It ain't the money,
It's the principle of the thing,
It ain't the money,
There's things that money can't buy.
It ain't the money
That makes the nucleus go round
It's the philosophical ethical principle of the thing.

2. He took himself to Germany to spend a year or two
With twinkling Otto Stern around to tell his troubles to,
Catalogues were thinner then, but sealing wax and string
Were plentiful and popular, so dough didn't mean a thing.

CHORUS

3. When Rabi came to Butler's-on-the-Hudson, for to stay
He thought and cogitated how to spend the long long day
He looked around the attics there for magnets and for stuff
And what he couldn't buy he said to put on the cuff.

CHORUS

4. Rabi got together quite a bunch of wacky guys
He didn't pick them out by the color of their eyes,
They worked hard all the day and then at night they worked some more
And their wives took jobs to keep the wolf from the door.

CHORUS

5. Rabi thought a system up to squirt some atoms through,
They fixed them up some magnets and a source of RF too.
Of a good night's sleep they often used to dream,
But all they ever saw was a molecular beam.

CHORUS

6. They worked on nuclear magnetic moments and on spins
They lived for years and years as though on needles and on pins
They finally got so tired Rabi thought it would be best
To start a branch of Radiation Lab for a rest.

CHORUS

7. Now way out there in Sweden where the money grows on trees,
The Nobel Prize Committee they were anxious for to please
They looked around for somebody, and Rabi was the guy
And when he heard about it, Rabi only said, "Why . . .

CHORUS

8. Now all you bright young fellows with your eyes upon the stars,
You graduate assistants who subsist on peanut bars
If industry should woo you with two hundred bucks a week
Refuse the job and say, without your tongue in your cheek,

It ain't the money
It's the principle of the thing
It ain't the money
There's things that money can't buy
It ain't the money
That makes the nucleus go round
It's the philosophical ethical principle, we keep telling ourselves, of the thing.