nuclear fission

Overlooked Achievement

Other than Marie Curie, little is known about women scientists. Ruth Lewin Sime, author of Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics, discusses the life of Meitner, a pioneer in nuclear physics and the epic story behind her co-discovery of nuclear fission.

 

Sime, Ruth Lewin.  Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics (University of California Press, 1997).

Lise Meitner (1878-1968) was a pioneer of nuclear physics and co-discoverer, with Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, of nuclear fission. Braving the sexism of the scientific world, she joined the prestigious Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry and became a prominent member of the international physics community. Of Jewish origin, Meitner fled Nazi Germany for Stockholm in 1938 and later moved to Cambridge, England. Her career was shattered when she fled Germany, and her scientific reputation was damaged when Hahn took full credit--and the 1944 Nobel Prize--for the work they had done together on nuclear fission. Ruth Sime's absorbing book is the definitive biography of Lise Meitner, the story of a brilliant woman whose extraordinary life illustrates not only the dramatic scientific progress but also the injustice and destruction that have marked the twentieth century.

Fleeing Germany

Lise Meitner at work at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute

Lise Meitner was Jewish, though she later converted to Protestanism, and was a committed pacifist as well. Therefore, she found it necessary to get out of Germany as quickly as possible. She fled first to Holland on an invalid passport, then to Niels Bohr's home in Copenhagen. She finally got across the North Sea to Sweden, just ahead of Nazi patrol boats. There she published a clear explanation of nuclear fission energy in 1939. Her paper expressed hope for a "promised land of atomic energy." Her aims had nothing to do with bombs; but of course her paper launched furious bomb-making efforts among the warring nations.

Later in 1939 she sent that strange cable to her friend in England. And he understood the name Maud Ray to be code for radium. The telegram warned him the Germans were stockpiling radium, and Meitner didn't like the implications of that one bit.

Meitner in 1963.  She died in 1968.

She later recieved word asking her to join the Manhattan Project. But she didn't like that any better. Six years later she was appalled to see how quickly her work led to devastation in Japan.

Years later, Lisa Meitner became the first woman to receive a share of the Fermi Award for her physics -- and, implicitly, for her contributions to the bomb she never wanted to make.

She was 88 and begged off -- said she wasn't up to the trip, so Glenn Seaborg went to London and brought the prize to her.

 

Adapted from:  John Lienhard at the University of Houston, Engines of Our Ingrenuity: http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi305.htm 

 

Early Work

Lise Meitner with Otto Hahn.  Meitner discovered nuclear fission.

In 1939 an English physicist received a cable from Sweden, and it seemed to make no sense. The clouds of WW-II were gathering over Europe, and here came a chatty cable about somebody he'd never heard of named Maud Ray Kent. Now who was Maud Ray Kent!

But he knew the woman who sent the wire: she was a noted physicist named Lisa Meitner. She had a doctorate from Vienna, and in 1908 she'd gone to work for Max Plank in Berlin. Her close colleague there was another young physicist named Otto Hahn. Their association stretched into a 60-year friendship.

Women weren't allowed to work in the laboratory, so Hahn and Meitner had created their own lab in a carpenter's shop. They worked on nuclear fission until WW-I. Then Meitner joined the Austrian army as an X-ray technician. But she kept working with Hahn whenever they both could get away on leave. By 1918 they'd created a new element they called protactinium. It is a part of the periodic table.

 By war's end, Germany had lost a whole generation of males, and opportunities had briefly improved for women. Meitner was made head of the physics department at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. There she and Hahn went to work on a and b radiation. Sixteen years later they were bombarding heavy elements with fast neutrons. It was finally Meitner who realized what enormous energy was released when uranium fissioned into barium.

 

Adapted from: 

John Lienhard at the University of Houston, Engines of Our Ingrenuity: http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi305.htm