Lise Meitner, a brilliant physicist who discovered several elements and played a critical role in the discovery of nuclear fission, called the 'German Marie Curie' by Einstein. Despite her significant contributions to science, Meitner was overlooked for a Nobel Prize; highlighting the challenges faced by women in the male-dominated field of physics.
→Early life and education
Born on either the 7th or the 17th of November 1878, she celebrated her birthday on the 7th. She was born “Elise Meitner” to an ethnically Jewish family wh owere not actual practitioners of Judaism.
She later converted to Lutheran Christianity and was baptised in 1908, followed by changing her name to “Lise” instead of “Elise”.
She had an obsession with science since childhood, starting research at the age of 8. She kept a notebook for her research notes under her pillow. Her main interests were maths and science. However, due to women not being allowed into public higher education institutes in Vienna at the time, she completed her final year of school in 1892. The only career available for women was teaching, so she trained to be a French teacher. In 1899, she began taking private lessons to cram 8 years worth of secondary education into just 2 years. After succeeding in such a tremendous challenge she got accepted into the University of Vienna in 1901. Only 4 years later, in 1905, she became the second woman to earn a degree in physics at the University of Vienna.
One of the first instances that demonstrated her abilities as a researcher was when she was asked to help explain a scientific article on optics. It discussed an experiment that produced results that Lord Rayleigh, the author of the article, had been unable to explain. She proved her abilities by explaining the results, making predictions, then verifying those predictions.
She later on worked with collimators and found that scattering in a beam with alpha particles increased atomic mass of metal atoms. Her findings later on helped Ernest Rutherford in predicting the structure of the atom.
→The next step of her amazing academic career
Later on, Meitner attended the Friedrich Wilhelm University meeting, where Max Planck allowed her to attend his lectures, but not his lab. An unusual gesture by Planck who thought women shouldn’t enter universities but thought Meitner “was the exception”
Knowing that in such a male dominated field she needed to widen her base and get a foot in to do further research she went to Heinrich Rubens (Head of the Experimental Physics Institute at the time). Rubens said he would be happy for her to work at his laboratory and also introduced Lise to the chemist Otto Hahn, both being the same age. Hahn was an established chemist who was credited to have discovered new isotopes and was described as being approachable by Meitner.
The head of the institute later on gave Hahn and Meitner a woodworking shop and electroscopes for their research, Though it was not possible to carry out their research there, so the Head of Inorganic Chemistry Department allowed Hahn to use his 2 private laboratories.
Although they were both unpaid researchers, the situation was especially horrible for Meitner due to not being able to access the private laboratories due to her being a woman. In addition, every time she needed to use the bathroom she would have to leave and go to a nearby restaurant.Despite that, she pushed through due to her love for research.
Meitner and Hahn later on went on to co-author 3 papers in 1908 and 6 more papers in 1909. However, they both had different goals; while Hahn wanted to discover new isotopes, Meitner wanted to understand their radiation.
→Moving on to bigger things
The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (KWI) for Chemistry was founded In 1912 with Hahn accepting an offer to become a professor there with a salary of 5,000 marks. Meanwhile, Meitner, being a woman, only worked as a “guest” with Hahn.
Later on, in the same year, she became an “assistant” at the Institute of Theoretical Physics to check exam papers. This being the least respected job on the academic ladder, but it was her first paid position and made her the first female scientific assistant in Prussia. After being introduced to Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1912 she became the same rank as Hahn, finally, but with a much smaller pay.Around the same period they opened the Hahn-Meitner laboratory.
That pay didn't last for long though, due to them, later on, creating the product “mesothorium” which was used for medical purposes. Even though Hahn got paid 66,000 marks, he gaveMeitner only 10%.
After returning from serving in World War I in 1917, Lise Meitner made a groundbreaking discovery. She was the first person to isolate the mother isotope and its actinium daughter product. She submitted her findings in 1918. Although other scientists had previously discovered the new element, they were unable to find another appropriate isotope with similar characteristics. They therefore agreed to name the element "protactinium" and assigned it the chemical symbol Pa, as suggested by Meitner.
Only a couple years later in 1922 Meitner became “Privatdozent”(a person who holds the ability and is allowed to teach at a university level) being the first woman in Prussia and the second in Germany to receive such a title. Max vonLaue argued for the requirement of an inaugural lecture not be waived so she gave an inaugural lecture on “Problems of Cosmic Physics" that was reported as “problems of COSMETIC physics”. It is not known whether it’s a mistake or due to her being a woman.
→ a war torn continent and the escape of a brilliant scientist
After Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933 and the Nazi party starting to crack down on jews in any public position, Meitner was dismissed from her position.Her position in WW1 “not being at the front” was the justification for the dismissal, but that had no effect on her work at the Institute for Chemistry. Later on due to jews not being allowed to publish in most scientific papers, she exclusively published in Naturwissenschaften which continued to accept scientists of all ethnicities and genders.
In 1938 Germany unified with Austria rendering Meitner’s Austrian citizenship useless so Dr. Niels Bohr offered her a lecturer position in Copenhagen, Denmark. Under the pressure of her knowing that the Reich Ministry of Science, Education and Culture was looking into her case; she accepted Bohr’s invitation. While applying for a visa, she discovered that her passport was rendered invalid. She is now trapped, unable to leave.
Bohr pulled strings and was able convince the Netherlands Ministry of Education to allow Meitner to go to the Netherlands and arranged for her appointment as a non-salaried privaat-docente (a requirement for all foreigner’s) at Leiden University.
The escape started with Meitner arriving at the same time as her daily routine to the Department of Chemistry and Hahn briefing her on the plan. Then she corrected papers like usual. She left with a diamond ring from Hahn and only 10 marks in her bag. Meitner then flew to Copenhagen and on the 1st of August she took the train to Stockholm. Finally arriving safely after an extremely tiring plan.
→ Lighting a way for a discovery that changes human history
In 1938, Hahn sent Meitner a letter describing his chemical proof that the product of his experiment of bombarding uranium with neutrons was barium, an element with 40% less mass. This extreme decrease was not explainable by radioactive decay. So after a walk with her husband Frisch, they sat down on a tree trunk and started to do calculations on a scrap piece of paper and came to the conclusion that the uranium nucleus was very unstable and could be ready to easily divide. They just correctly interpreted Hahn’s results to mean that he split the nucleus roughly in half and predicted the other element formed to be krypton not masurium as suggested by Hahn.
Then, after many long distance phone calls, Meitner and Frisch came up with a simple experiment to prove their claim with Frisch conducting it on 13th of February and finding the results were as they predicted. So Frisch then called an American biologist and asked “what do you call it when a cells divides into 2” the biologist replied “fission” and so “nuclear fission” was born.
→ being overlooked for a prize
In 1945, the Nobel Committee for Chemistry awarded the Nobel Prize solely to Hahn even though the directions of Meitner wereessential for the discovery. This was later ascribed to multiple factors including Meitner being a woman and the committee being ill-suited to assess the work of a physicist’s work in a chemistry discovery. The 1997 article by Lisabeth Crawford and Mark Walker said “Meitner's exclusion from the chemistry award may well be summarised as a mixture of disciplinary bias, political obtuseness, ignorance, and haste”
Meitner later on wrote in a letter “Surely Hahn fully deserved the Nobel Prize for chemistry. There is really no doubt about it. But I believe that Frisch and I contributed something not insignificant to the clarification of the process of uranium fission—how it originates and that it produces so much energy and that was something very remote to Hahn.”
→ her later years
Even though she is sometimes called “the mother of the atomic bomb” the actual story was she was invited to join the Manhattan Project but refused the offer saying “I will have nothing to do with a bomb!” After it was eventually developed without her and dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, she went on to comment saying “sorry that the bomb had to be invented” but the bombings still later went on to make her a celebrity for stuff she hated.
In 1946 she received “woman of the year” award and had dinner with President Truman who is said to have told her “we are in this problem because of you young lady” showing how she was still seen as a “woman” before being seen as a physicist.
→ death and awards after death
She passed away in her sleep on the 27th of October, 1968 at the age of 89 due to multiple health issues including a fractured hip, atherosclerosis, multiple thrombi and a heart attack.
Posthumously, Element 109 was named meitnerium after her and the Hahn– Meitner-Institut in Berlin was opened in her name.
Excerpts from:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/reviews/lisemeitner.htm
Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics
Otto Hahn: A Scientific Autobiography
http://www.orlandoleibovitz.com/Lise_Meitner_and_Nuc lear_Fission.html
Sallie A. Watkins; The making of a physicist. The Physics Teacher 1 January 1984; 22 (1): 12–15. https://doi.org/10.1119/1.2341442
https://iopscience.iop.org/book/978-1-6817-464 5-6/chapter/bk978-1-6817-4645-6ch3
What Little I Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
The Making of the Atomic Bomb
Dawidoff, Nicholas (1994). The Catcher was a Spy.
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