@nyrath Oh wow, I had forgotten those things existed. I remember seeing one of those, with the sparks, when I was little.

@design_law Of the Odessa Vrebucojys?

New episodes of Connections!

https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/11/fans-of-connections-rejoice-rebooted-classic-sci-doc-series-returns-with-original-host/

I had very high hopes for this one, I thought it would be exactly the sort of joke mastodon would appreciate!

@gregpak <<Q*bert noises>>

@_thegeoff The answer is that yes, if I find a chance to learn a bit more I will. I don't really know that much about the development of the ideas!

@_thegeoff I mean if I understood them well enough I could in principle do it any time :)

1) Igor Dmitriyevich Novikov, who introduced the concept of the white hole in 1964, was born #OTD in 1935. He also introduced a self-consistency principle for time-travel...

2) ...in spacetimes with closed timelike curves. It posits that any event which would lead to a paradox must have probability zero.

Little mouse hanging out next to a copy of Paula Lambert’s “Cheese Lover’s Cookbook” in our neighborhood used book store.

@Virginicus Thank you, at least someone noticed!

@Canageek Oh yeah, I've used it many times, though typically I do these things with pure pgf/TikZ.

Radial light rays and causal structure of the Schwarzschild black hole, plotted in Eddington-Finkelstein coordinates, for the relativity students.

Need to redo this in PGF/TikZ!

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"

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

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)

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

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.

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.

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.