a brief history of Lise Meitner

Before Women's History Month ends, there's one woman who lived during the 20th

Century who needs to receive more attention, especially in these times of war,

rumors of war, and an increased threat of nuclear weapons use.

Ever heard of Lise Meitner?

That's what I thought. She was born in Vienna in 1878 and died in Cambridge,

England, in 1968. (Lise was originally Elise, but it's pronounced just like

Lisa.) In her 90 years of unmarried life, Meitner earned a doctorate in

physics, became a prominent experimental nuclear physicist (and protege of

Einstein, Shrodinger, et al) in Berlin, and then became a refugee from Germany

after Hitler's annexation of Austria in 1938.

It was on Christmas Eve of 1938, after 6 months of living in exile in Sweden, that Meitner made the most important scientific discovery of her life—and one of the most important of the 20th Century. She and her physicist nephew Otto Frisch did

some simple calculations and drawings that convinced them a uranium nucleus hit

by a neutron could be split in half, a process that they shortly named nuclear

fission.

Although Einstein's E=mc^2 formula had been around since September 1905,

Meitner, on that Christmas Eve morning, was the first to see how it applied to the fissioning of the uranium nucleus. Before being exiled from her work with her collaborators Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann in Berlin, Meitner had instigated their experiments involving neutron bombardment of uranium. Because she was Jewish, however, Meitner could not continue to lead their experimental team after March 1938, the month of Hitler's annexation and occupation of Austria. But she and Hahn kept in constant contact by mail after she illegally and with much sadness left Germany for Sweden.

Hahn later received the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his and Strassmann's

chemical separations, done in late 1938, showing neutron bombardment of uranium

produced barium, an element with about half the mass of uranium. Hahn, like other

scientists of the time, could not understand such a result until Meitner received word of it and she and Frisch made their theoretical calculation showing the nucleus could split.

When she had a chance to leave her pittance of a research job in Sweden in the

early 1940s and go work on the Manhattan Project in the United States, Meitner

refused, saying "I will have nothing to do with a bomb!" She had been a volunteer X-ray technician during World War I, and unlike many past and present supporters of war, she knew what it truly involved.

Ruth Lewin Sime, in her definitive 1996 biography, Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics, explains: "Meitner wanted no part of deaths anywhere: she could not commit herself and her physics—the two were not distinct—to a weapon of war. She had seen the casualties

firsthand in 1915-1916; she had heard the screams. She could not do it. Her

decision was instantaneous and absolute: there was no discussion. She would

not work on the bomb."

Besides Sime's book, other references on this unusual and overlooked scientist include the 1992 BBC documentary, "A Gift From Heaven," (Hahn's phrase for what he regarded as his fission discovery), and Rachel Barron’s book Lise Meitner: Discoverer of

Nuclear Fission, published in 2000.

Although Meitner was nominated several times for a Nobel Prize in physics, it

was never awarded to her.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

There's also an original b&w photo located outside the ground floor lecture

hall in Robert Lee Moore Hall on the UT campus, from the 1933 Solvay physics

conference, that shows Meitner and Irene Curie and about 20 mostly famous male

scientists and has their original signatures on it. Einstein was at the

earlier Solvay conferences, but had permanently moved to Princeton in 1933 to escape the Nazi’s and did not attend the 1933 conference.