She left for Berlin in 1907 with family support, to attend Dr Max Planck’s lectures and to do radio-activity research with chemist Dr Otto Hahn. After a year, she became his Hahn’s assistant and worked with him, wanted to discover isotopes. In 1913 physicist Meitner and chemist Hahn collaborated at Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Chemistry in Berlin.
Drs Meitner and Hahn in their laboratory, 1913
German History Intersections
Meitner supported the Austrian army as a medical X-ray technician in WWI, returning to Berlin in 1917 when she and Hahn discovered the radioactive chemical element protactinium. Meitner was awarded the 1917 Leibniz Medal.
Having isolated the isotope protactinium, Meitner and Hahn studied nuclear isomerism and beta decay. In 1926 she became the first female Professor of Physics in Germany, heading up the Physics Dept at Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry. Research at the time was theoretical, but many scientists knew about the honour of the Nobel Prize waiting for the winner who discovered it. She worked with Hahn for 30 years, collaborating closely, studying radioactivity, with her physics skills and his chemistry skills.
In the 1930s with the German physical chemist Dr Fritz Strassmann, she investigated neutron bombardment of uranium. Strassmann was not Jewish but he refused to join the Nazi Party, so both their research efforts were interrupted as the Nazis gained power. She stayed in Germany longer than most because of her Austrian citizenship, but because she was Jewish, her physicist friends had to help sneak her over the border when Austria was annexed by Germany in 1938. Then she worked in Sweden at the Nobel Institute for Experimental Physics, then continued her laboratory work at Stockholm’s Manne Siegbahn Institute, developing a working relationship with Niels Bohr.
Physicist Dr Otto Frisch (1904–79) was the Austrian-born first cousin of Lise Meitner. He first measured the magnetic moment of the proton and together they advanced the first theoretical explanation of nuclear fission and first detected the fission by-products.
While working together, Otto Frisch and Lise Meitner received the news that Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann had discovered that the collision of a neutron with a uranium nucleus produced the element barium as one of its by-products. Frisch and Meitner both hypothesised that the uranium nucleus had split in two, coining the term nuclear fission to describe the process. After Hahn and Strassmann showed that barium appeared in neutron-bombarded uranium, it was Meitner and Frisch who explained the physical characteristics of this division.
L->R Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, Otto Stern, Meitner, Rudolf Ladenburg and ?
conference in 1937, Wiki
In Feb 1939, Meitner published the physical explanation for the observations. Meitner, Frisch and colleagues found that uranium atoms split when bombarded with neutrons, releasing a large amount of energy. Nuclear fission process was later used in nuclear power plants and bombs.
Hahn had isolated evidence for nuclear fission, but Meitner and Frisch were the first to clarify how the process occurred. Yet in 1944 Hahn alone received the Chemistry Nobel Prize regarding nuclear fission, given that he ignored Meitner’s research after she left Germany. He should have argued that Meitner merited the Nobel Prize as well.
After WW2 Meitner continued working in Sweden, then travelled and lectured across the USA. Her recognition of the explosive potential of the process was what motivated Dr Albert Einstein to contact Pres Roosevelt, leading to the establishment of the Manhattan Project. She was then invited to work on the Project at Los Alamo but Meitner opposed the atomic bomb and refused to work there at all.
On a visit to the U.S in 1946 she was welcomed by her siblings, and given total American press celebrity treatment, including being named Woman of the Year by the Women's National Press Club, DC. She had dinner with Pres Harry Truman who mistakenly thought that she worked on the atomic bomb but Lise Meitner refused to work on a bomb.
Her Swedish colleagues planned to get her a proper position. In 1947, Meitner moved to Stockholm’s Royal Institute of Technology to establish a new facility for atomic research, with researchers to help. Appropriately she received in the Max Planck Medal, honouring her old mentor in Berlin.
Hahn had isolated evidence for nuclear fission, but Meitner and Frisch were the first to clarify how the process occurred. Yet in 1944 Hahn alone received the Chemistry Nobel Prize regarding nuclear fission, given that he ignored Meitner’s research after she left Germany. He should have argued that Meitner merited the Nobel Prize as well.
After WW2 Meitner continued working in Sweden, then travelled and lectured across the USA. Her recognition of the explosive potential of the process was what motivated Dr Albert Einstein to contact Pres Roosevelt, leading to the establishment of the Manhattan Project. She was then invited to work on the Project at Los Alamo but Meitner opposed the atomic bomb and refused to work there at all.
On a visit to the U.S in 1946 she was welcomed by her siblings, and given total American press celebrity treatment, including being named Woman of the Year by the Women's National Press Club, DC. She had dinner with Pres Harry Truman who mistakenly thought that she worked on the atomic bomb but Lise Meitner refused to work on a bomb.
Her Swedish colleagues planned to get her a proper position. In 1947, Meitner moved to Stockholm’s Royal Institute of Technology to establish a new facility for atomic research, with researchers to help. Appropriately she received in the Max Planck Medal, honouring her old mentor in Berlin.
Lise Meitner, Life in Physics,
(California Studies in the History of Science,
by Ruth Lewin Sime, 1997, Amazon
The physicist who never lost her humanity died in Cambridge in Oct 1968. In 1992, element 109 was named Meitnerium in her honour. Like many others, I believe she was the most significant woman scientist of the 20th century!
By Dr Joe
Melbourne
.jpg)
18 comments:
What an amazing woman, born during the time that many people still thought the female brain unable to handle advanced learning let alone stuff like physics.
For a scientist who never won a Nobel Prize, it is interesting that Meitner worked in Sweden at the Nobel Institute for Experimental Physics. I looked up how many women have won the Nobel Prize for Physics - 5.... 3 of them very recently.
She certainly achieved a lot and apparently a clever woman who used her skills in the right way.
I'm adding this book to my reading list. Years ago I took a summer "course" type of thing where she was mentioned a lot in the study, This is a really interesting post, and she was a very accomplished woman, especially in a time when science didn't encourage woman. Enjoy the rest of your weekend.
Jo-Anne
correct... females were largely not allowed to enter universities back then. I asked my mother what clever high school girls applied for, if and when they finished Matriculation, and her response was "the very clever girls were sent to Teachers' College and the average girls enrolled in Secretarial Training. University Physics must have been out of the question.
Cous
quite right! Since first Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded in 1901 to Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, only five women have won one: Marie Curie (1903) and Maria Goeppert-Mayer (1963). Then there was a rush on for female winners: Donna Strickland (2018), Andrea Ghez (2020) and Anne L'Huillier (2023).
Margaret
Correct. Dr Meitner was not just a very clever and hard working scientist; she had strong moral values that directed her behaviour. I wonder if not marrying and not having babies freed her up to travel, study and retain her moral values as she wanted to.
Erika
Lise Meitner, A Life in Physics by Ruth Lewin Sime is well worth reading, if you have any scientific ideas in your head. I have none, so I gave the book to Dr Joe and he found it wonderful.
"because girls weren't allowed tertiary education"
In the 1960s my dad still didn't believe girls needed education, since they would just get married and stay home keeping house while having babies, so I stayed at school until leaving age (15 back then) only because the law said I had to. Then I had work for a few years, got married and did the whole stay home, keep house and have babies thing. I actually enjoyed all that, but eventually had to go back to work. I did encourage my kids to stay in school, though all of them quit somewhere in their fianl year and got jobs instead.
I wonder how my life might have been different if my parents had thought as Dr. Meitner's parents did. She certainly did very well.
River
so many of my friends said the same thing as you did even after WW2, let alone in 1900 when Dr Meitner had to deal with expectations then. My own parents, on the other hand, were very keen that ALL their children got a university education! But they warmly encouraged the boys to do engineering, applied science or architecture while I was expected to do literature, English and foreign languages, psychology or history.
I suppose Lise was very fortunate that her father was a lawyer and expected his family to be educated. Her sister Gisela was a practising doctor. Her sister Gusti was a composer and concert pianist.
In 1908 on a visit to Vienna Lise formally withdrew from the Jewish community and was baptized at the Evangelical Congregation, aged 30.
Adolf Hitler’s racist decrees in April 1933 stripped Jewish academics of their professorial positions. However Meitner held her paid position at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry until the Third Reich’s invasion of Austria in 1938. In 1938 the National Socialists issued an order forbidding famous scientists to travel abroad. Dutch physicist Prof Dirk Coster secretly accompanied Meitner by train across Nazi borders into the Netherlands. With the assistance of Bohr, she departed for Copenhagen.
Jewish Women's Archive
https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/meitner-lise
Clearly conversion to Christianity in 1908 did not protect the brilliant physicist.
Joe
thanks for the reference. Clearly conversion to Christianity in 1908 did not protect Dr Meitner, no matter how famous she was and how essential she and her colleagues were to the German scientific world and economy.
Boa tarde. Aproveito para desejar uma excelente segunda-feira, com muita paz e saúde. Obrigado pela excelente matéria.
Luiz
it is truly a fascinating story, and one that possibly hasn't finished yet.
Maybe Otto Fritsch oughtta have spoken up for his lady colleague. The guy had a hectic go of it slipping off to England in 1933. He worked in labs there and eventually was added to the Manhattan Project. At Los Alamos he devised a jig to drop a naked slug of enriched U235 through a ring of similar material and produce short enough energetic excursions that worked without cooking the experimenters. These basket shots, not far from a small boiling water reactor, were christened "The Lady Godiva Experiment." The whole complex lost electric power as one of these slugs fell through the hoop. Cars fled in all directions, but by sheer coincidence the Albuquerque power plant had suffered an outage as the slug passed the ring. False alarm. Because of these tests, the Uranium bomb needed no testing. It was so sure to explode the pilot disarmed it without permission before takeoff and only armed it again on the way to Japan.
Hank
I knew nothing about Otto Fritsch's involvement until accidentally reading the following:
'Otto Frisch got a Nobel Prize for figuring out the mechanics of fission. It seemed like he would be the last person to underestimate it. But he came within a couple of seconds of getting killed by the fission tester he named Lady Godiva'.
Read Esther Inglis-Arkell,
https://gizmodo.com/the-time-a-legendary-physicist-was-nearly-killed-by-lad-1412992899
Why did she not win a Nobel Prize? New translations of hundreds of letters explain, in a two-part episode of Lost Women of Science, why physicist Lise Meitner was not awarded the Nobel Prize in 1944 for splitting the atom. Instead, it was given to her long-time collaborator, chemist Otto Hahn. When Marissa Moss came to research her biography of Meitner, The Woman who Split the Atom: The Life of Lise Meitner (2022), she found thousands of her letters in the Cambridge University archive, many of which had never been translated.
Meitner's her letters with Hahn, which reveal not only that it was Meitner who discovered nuclear fission, when she interpreted experiments that Hahn could not understand, but also her fraught relationship with Hahn. She went to great lengths through her letters to understand his refusal to give her credit for her work before and after the 1944 Nobel Prize was awarded.
Lost Women of Science
many thanks. It does not come as a surprise that thousands of her letters are kept in the Cambridge University archive, untranslated but otherwise safe. What is surprising is that Otto Hahn and his supporters left the letters in the archive untouched over the years, and that the the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, who confers the prizes for physics, chemistry etc, didn't look themselves.
Post a Comment