Geeks in History: Lise Meitner
After the issue after the earthquakes in Japan earlier this year, nuclear power has been a rather hot topic. The thought of nuclear power as a clean fuel source comes up in every election season and it a matter of much debate. Did one ever stop to think of when nuclear fission came about and who was responsible for it? There’s one woman who was a big part of the team that discovered it, sadly unrewarded for her contribution. Her name was Lise Meitner.
Lise Meitner was born into a Jewish family in Vienna, Austria, the third of eight children, on November 7, 1878. She studied under physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, and in 1905 she became the second woman to obtain a doctoral degree in physics from the University of Vienna. After graduation, her father financially backed her decision to move to Berlin where she was allowed to attend the lectures of Max Planck, the German physicist who is generally credited with founding quantum theory. Meitner later became his assistant and also worked with Otto Hahn to discover new isotopes. She presented two papers on beta-radiation in 1909.
Lise Meitner in 1900.
In 1912, she and Hahn joined the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut (KWI) in Berlin, working as a guest in Hahn’s Radio-chemistry department. In 1913, she was finally granted a permanent position. During World War I, she worked as a nurse using X-ray equipment, returning to Berlin in 1916 to continue her research though a part of her wanted to continue helping those wounded in the war. In 1917, she received the Leibniz Medal by the Berlin Academy of Sciences after she and Hahn discovered the first long-lived isotope of the element protactinium. In 1922, she discovered the Auger effect, and in 1926 she became the first woman in Germany to become a full professor of physics where her research led to the co-discovery of nuclear fission in 1939. Albert Einstein was quoted as calling her the “German Marie Curie”.
During World War II, she was protected in her position by her Austrian citizenship, but many other Jewish scientists were forced to resign or were dismissed from their posts, including her former lecture partner, Leó Szilárd. She continued to bury herself in work, but was quoted in 1946 saying that “It was not only stupid but also very wrong that I did not leave at once.” After Austria was annexed, she escaped to the Netherlands with help from colleagues, leaving all of her possessions behind except for 10 marks. She eventually settled in Stockholm, working at Manne Siegbahn’s laboratory and continuing her contact with her former German colleagues.
It was during World War II that she continued to correspond with Hahn, who was working with Fritz Strassmann at the time. She and her nephew, Otto Frisch, first released a theory of how the nucleus of an atom could be split into smaller parts, resulting in a large burst of energy from the loss of greater mass and that no stable elements beyond uranium could exist in nature. Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann published this information in December 1938, reporting they had detected the element barium after bombarding uranium with neutrons and sent the same information to Meitner, where she correctly recognized it as nuclear fission. In this, she saw danger in the fact that this process could lead to an explosive chain reaction, making it perfect for use as a weapon. Because this information was in German hands, she convinced Albert Einstein to write President Franklin D Roosevelt a letter of warning, leading to the creation of the Manhattan Project.
Over the course of her life, she won many awards, though she had been overlooked for the Nobel Prize that Otto Hahn received, having been a large contributor to the discovery. She refused to move back to Germany, becoming a Swedish citizen and continuing her research, contributing to the creation of Sweden’s first nuclear reactor. She was quite vocal in her criticism of German scientists who collaborated with Nazis, including her colleague Otto Hahn. In 1960, she moved to Britain and died in Cambridge on October 27, 1968. The inscription on her headstone, composed by her nephew, reads “Lise Meitner: a physicist who never lost her humanity.”
Geeks in History is a biweekly column about notable geeks of the past and how they impacted modern life.
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