Meitner, Lise (1878–1968)
In a 1959 lecture at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, Lise Meitner reflected that "Life need not be easy, provided that it is not empty." Life was not easy for any Jewish woman scientist in Germany in the first half of the twentieth century, and Meitner certainly had her own experience in mind when she made this statement.
Lise Meitner grew up in the Vienna of Emperor Franz-Josef and horsedrawn trolley cars. She was born there in 1878 into a well-to-do Jewish family and decided at an early age that she wanted to be a scientist like Madame Curie. (Later Albert Einstein would call her "the German Madame Curie.") In 1901, she entered the University of Vienna. There, where serious women students were considered odd, she was treated rudely by many of her fellow students. In 1905 she was only the second woman in the university's history to receive a Ph.D. in science.
In 1907, she went to Berlin to study under Max Planck, promising her devoted parents that she would return to Vienna in six months at the most. She stayed in Berlin for thirty-one years. In Berlin, Meitner met Otto Hahn, a professor of chemistry, and took an unpaid position assisting Hahn with his research on the chemistry of radioactive substances. At that time women were not allowed to work in the Chemical Institute, and she had to set up her laboratory in a carpenter's workshop outside the Institute.
While continuing work with Hahn at the new Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin-Dahlem, beginning in 1912 Meitner served as assistant to Max Planck at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of Berlin, and in 1918 was appointed head of the physics department at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute.
Lise Meitner. (Library of Congress)Meitner's Contributions to Nuclear Energy
In their years together Hahn and Meitner did significant research on beta- and gamma-ray spectra. They discovered the new element protoactinium-91 and, at Meitner's suggestion, took up, and made great progress with, work on neutron bombardment of nuclei that Enrico Fermi had commenced in Rome. In 1938, this research was suspended when Adolph Hitler annexed Austria and Meitner had to flee Germany.
Based on the strong recommendations of her German physics colleagues, Meitner received a research position in the Stockholm laboratory of Manne Siegbahn, the Swedish physicist who had received the 1924 Nobel Prize in Physics for his precision measurements on X-ray spectra. Siegbahn provided laboratory space for Meitner, but no suitable equipment for her to continue the research she had started in Berlin, and little encouragement for her work.
Meitner was left very much to herself in the Stockholm Physics Institute, which had little research in progress when she arrived in 1938. Meitner's stipend from the Nobel Foundation was a pittance, and she was forced to do without many of the little comforts she had grown used to in Berlin. It was a difficult time for her, relieved only by regular letters from Hahn containing news of what had once been their joint research effort.
At the end of 1938, Hahn sent her a description of his experiments on the interaction of neutrons with uranium. He and a young chemist, Fritz Strassman, had determined that one of the reaction products was clearly barium. Meitner was so excited about this that she showed Hahn's letter to her nephew, physicist Otto Frisch. Their discussions on the topic gave birth to the idea of nuclear fission.
Frisch then demonstrated in his laboratory the tremendous release of energy accompanying fission, and a short paper by Meitner and Frisch in the British journal Naturein 1939 revealed the momentous concept of nuclear fission to the scientific world. It provided a new source of energy for the Earth, while at the same time introducing the possibility of a new weapon capable of unbelievable destructive power.
The step from nuclear fission to a nuclear chain reaction and the atomic bomb was, in principle, quite straightforward. In practice, however, it consumed more time and money than was ever foreseen. Although it was her basic insight that eventually led to the fission bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Meitner refused to work on the bomb and, for humanitarian reasons, hoped that it would not work.
When the question of the award of a Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of nuclear fission arose at the end of World War II, it was complicated by the fact that both Hahn and Strassmann were chemists. Another complication was that the Nobel Prize Committee had always considered radioactivity and radioactive atoms the responsibility of their chemistry committee—despite the fact that the discovery of fission had been interdisciplinary from beginning to end. The Swedish Academy of Science was divided on whether the Chemistry Prize should be given jointly to Hahn and Meitner, or to Hahn alone. Finally they decided by a close vote to give the 1945 chemistry prize solely to Otto Hahn.
The physics prize was still in question, and many nominators were strong in their support of Meitner as the recipient. She had continued to correspond with Hahn and advise him from afar on experiments to beperformed in Berlin, but when Hahn and Strassmann published their paper on barium as a reaction product of neutron bombardment of uranium, Meitner's name was not included as a coauthor. The Nobel Committee finally decided to award no physics prize for the discovery of nuclear fission in 1945, and gave the prize for that year to Wolfgang Pauli for his theoretical discovery of the Exclusion Principle.
After the war, although now famous, Meitner continued her research in Stockholm, interrupted only by trips to receive honorary degrees and other scientific accolades. She shared in the prestigious Enrico Fermi Prize awarded by the U.S. Atomic Energy Committee in 1966. She retired to Cambridge, England, in 1960, to be near her nephew, Otto Frisch, and died there in 1968 at the age of ninety. Like so many people all over the world during the Hitler period, Meitner's life had been far from easy, but no reasonable person would ever be tempted to call her life empty.
Bibliography
Crawford, D. (1969). Lise Meitner, Atomic Pioneer. New York: Crown Publishers.
Crawford, E.; Sime, R. L.; and Walker, M. (1996). "A Nobel Tale of Wartime Injustice." Nature 382:393-95.
Frisch, O. R. (1970). "Lise Meitner." Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 16:405-420.
Frisch, O. R. (1974). "Lise Meitner." In Dictionary of Scientific Biography, Vol. 9, ed. C. C. Gillispie. New York: Scribner.
Meitner, L. (1964). "Looking Back." Bulletin of the Atomic Sciuentists 20:2-7.
Meitner, L., and Frisch, O. R. (1939). "Disintegration of Uranium by Neutrons: A New Type of Nuclear Reaction." Nature 143:239.
Sime, R. L. (1996). Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics. Los Angeles: University of California Press.
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