Robert McNees
Physicist Lise Meitner was born #OTD in 1878. She discovered fission in uranium with Otto Frisch, and was the first person to understand both its mechanics and implications.
Per usual, the Nobel Committee awarded a prize to some of her colleagues, but left her off.
Image: Atomic Heritage Foundation (photographer unknown)
Robert McNees
Meitner's PhD at the University of Vienna was supervised by Ludwig Boltzmann, of S ~ ln W fame, along with Franz Eckner and Hans Benndorf.
In 1907 she went to Berlin to work with Max Planck and Otto Hahn. Meitner's collaboration with Hahn would last for 30 years.
Meitner handled the physics and Hahn did the chemistry. They had complementary approaches to science — it was a partnership made for discovery. Together, they made several advances related to radioactivity.
Robert McNees
Meitner also discovered, in 1922, what is commonly called the “Auger Effect.”
You will not be surprised to learn that Pierre Auger discovered it independently in 1923, a year *after* Meitner.
Other people receiving credit for Meitner's work will be a theme, so please feel free to refer to it as the “Meitner effect” or the “Meitner-Auger effect.”
Robert McNees
Meitner was Jewish, so in 1938 she was forced to flee Germany. She traveled to Sweden and found work in the lab of Manne Siegbahn.
Siegbahn was not supportive of women in science, which complicated things for Meitner. But she managed to stay in touch with Hahn.
They secretly met in Copenhagen in November 1938, planning experiments to extend their "transuranium research” program began in 1935. That December, their experiments – performed by Hahn in Berlin – provided evidence of nuclear fission.
Robert McNees
Hahn kept the results hidden from physicists at his institute in Berlin, so no one would know about his secret collaboration with Meitner. He published them in January 1939.
Meitner and Otto Frisch (her nephew!) published the physical explanation in February, after working out the basic model over the Christmas holiday. During a snowy hike they stopped at a tree stump for a back-of-the-envelope calculation that explained ~200 MeV of energy released in the reaction ²³⁵U + n → ¹⁴⁴Ba + ⁹⁰Kr + 2n.
Robert McNees
Niels Bohr was also working on fission at the time with Léon Rosenfeld. He knew of Meitner's work, so when Rosenfeld told the Princeton Physics Journal Club about their collaboration, Bohr quickly wrote a letter to Nature asserting the priority of Meitner and Frisch. He was aware that his reputation would carry a lot of weight, and didn't want them to lose rightful credit.
Robert McNees
Hahn won the Nobel in Chemistry in 1944 for the experiments he devised with Meitner.
Meitner was not awarded the Physics prize for her explanation of the process. She was nominated several times, but she never won.
These things aren't always as simple as they sound. Clearly she deserved a prize, but she wasn't the only one left off the Chemistry and Physics prizes. Still, the Nobel Prize has historically gone out of its way to overlook contributions by women. That can't be ignored here.
Robert McNees
And of course anti-Semitism played a huge part.
Hahn remained in Berlin throughout the rise of the Nazis. Was he hiding his collaboration with Meitner to protect the results? Or was he was trying to hide his connection to a Jewish collaborator whose insights made his work possible?
In the eyes of many of her colleagues, Lise Meitner was a woman and a Jew first, and a superior scientist second. Her career suffered for it.
Robert McNees
Meitner's work on fission set off a chain of events which led to the Manhattan Project and the atomic bomb. She came to the US, but refused an offer to work at Los Alamos.
“I will have nothing to do with a bomb!”
Ref: Ruth Lewin Sime "Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics,” p. 305
Robert McNees
Nevertheless, when she toured the US in 1946 she was given the Einstein celebrity treatment.
The media tried to portray her as escaping Germany with the "bomb in her purse," but Meitner was not having it.
MGM wanted to make a film, but Meitner was aghast at all the errors in their script. She threatened to sue them for misrepresenting her story, and said “I would rather walk naked down Broadway!” than take part in the production. (Sime, p. 332)
Robert McNees
Instead, Meitner visited colleagues at various universities, and spent time with students.
Here she is, years later, talking with undergraduates during a 1959 visit to Bryn Mawr.
Image: Heka Davis, AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Physics Today Collection
Robert McNees
Meitner returned to Sweden after the war, and became the head of her own laboratory funded by the Swedish Atomic Energy Commission. In 1960 she settled down in Cambridge, close to relatives.
She remained close friends with Hahn for the rest of her life, and as far as I know she never said a bad word about him.
Lise Meitner passed away in 1968. Her nephew and collaborator Otto Frisch composed her epitaph: "Lise Meitner: a physicist who never lost her humanity"
Thony Christie
@mcnees As I have pointed out in the past Hahn was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for the experiment that showed the existence of fission in which Meitner was not involved. Should she have received the Nobel Prize for Physics for working out the theory of fission, yes 100% But it's even more complex because Strassman was involved in the experiment and got nothing and Frisch cowrote the theory paper https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2015/04/30/unsung-i-hardly-think-so/
mathegudrun (she/her)
@mcnees i really liked the following podcast episode about her work https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/lost-women-of-science/id1590670779?i=1000627828927
Robert McNees
@Virginicus Thank you, at least someone noticed!
Virginicus
@mcnees “set off a chain of events” 👏🏻👏🏻
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