Before he was grey-haired and obsessive, Albert Einstein wasn't a bad looking man. Neither was Niels Bohr, nor Fermi, nor Werner Heisenberg, Lise England's particular friend. She is based on the real life physics hero, Lise Meitner. In the mid 1920's all was congenial, everyone shared. They were just understanding E=mc^2. The yearly Copenhagen meetings at young Bohr's Institute for Theoretical Physics and Copenhagen was were they all became friends, all young then. Lise, born in Vienna, but educated in Italy and in the English Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, the world center of early 20th-century physics, was their equal.

But she left for the United States and Berkeley, an equal of Robert Oppenheimer and Ernest Lawrence. She got there just in time for Hitler's first 1933 edict, stripping non-Aryan academics of their posts. Fermi, Bohr, and many others were engineered out of Germany's long reach. Heisenberg, though, stayed.

Soon afterward she made a major discovery, how to separate Uranium -- and how she lost her vision. And that's what was holding the German's back, their ignorance of how to acquire the Uranium 235. And wouldn't you know it, Niels asked her to go to Werner. Asked him to come to the United States. So she went. And fought against Germany, the side her brother, Otto, fought for.

The shadow was unstable. An altercation between Corwin and Eric in the midst of a court battle over Otto. Eric trumped her out, along with a shadow by the name of Tenely, the court reporter at the time. They sailed through shadow seas to Amber.

This shadow's timeline ran fast, and Lise never managed to adjust to it. So while seventy years passed there, she was in body and mind only fifteen. She was considered a genius and an avant guard, and an eccentric, her obsessive nature not only encouraged, but nurtured. Her mother, Eva, died when Lisle was a teenager. She has one full blood brother, Otto.