Lise Meitner Totally Explained

Everything about Lise Meitner totally explained

Lise Meitner (November 7 or 17, the former being the date Lise observed 1878 – October 27, 1968) was an Austrian born, later Swedish physicist who studied radioactivity and nuclear physics.

Biography

Lise Meitner was part of the team that discovered nuclear fission, an achievement for which her colleague Otto Hahn was awarded the Nobel Prize. Meitner is often mentioned as one of the most glaring examples of scientific achievement that was ostensibly overlooked by the Nobel committee. A 1997 Physics Today study concluded that Meitner's omission was "a rare instance in which personal negative opinions apparently led to the exclusion of a deserving scientist" from the Nobel.

Early years

Lise Meitner was born into a Jewish family as the third of eight children in Vienna, 2nd district (Leopoldstadt). Her father, Philipp Meitner, was one of the first Jewish lawyers in Austria. The birth register of Vienna's Jewish community lists Lise as being born on November 17 1878 but all other documents list it as November 7, which is what Meitner used. She was the second woman to earn a doctoral degree in physics at the University of Vienna.
   After the Anschluss, her situation became desperate. In July 1938, Meitner, with help from the Dutch physicists Coster and Fokker, escaped to Holland. She was forced to travel under cover to the Dutch border, where Coster persuaded German immigration officers that she'd permission to travel to the Netherlands. She reached safety, though without her possessions. Meitner later said that she left Germany forever with 10 marks in her purse. Before she left, Otto Hahn had given her a diamond ring he'd inherited from his mother: this was to be used to bribe the frontier guards if required. It wasn't required, and Meitner's nephew's wife later wore it. Meitner was lucky to escape, as Kurt Hess, a chemist who was an avid Nazi, had informed the authorities that she was about to flee. However, unknown friends only checked after they knew she was safe. An appointment at Groningen University didn't come through, and she went instead to Stockholm, where she took up a post at Manne Siegbahn's laboratory, despite the difficulty caused by Siegbahn's prejudice against women in science. Here she established a working relationship with Niels Bohr, who travelled regularly between Copenhagen and Stockholm. She continued to correspond with Hahn and other German scientists.
   Hahn and Meitner met clandestinely in Copenhagen in November to plan a new round of experiments; in this regard they subsequently exchanged a series of letters. Hahn then performed the difficult experiments which isolated the evidence for nuclear fission at his laboratory in Berlin. The surviving correspondence shows that Hahn recognized that fission was the only explanation for the barium, but, baffled by this remarkable conclusion, he wrote to Meitner. The possibility that uranium nuclei might break up under neutron bombardment had been suggested years before, notably by Ida Noddack in 1934. However, by employing the existing "liquid-drop" model of the nucleus, Meitner and Frisch were the first to articulate a theory of how the nucleus of an atom could be split into smaller parts: uranium nuclei had split to form barium and krypton, accompanied by the ejection of several neutrons and a large amount of energy (the latter two products accounting for the loss in mass). She and Frisch had discovered the reason that no stable elements beyond uranium (in atomic number) existed naturally; the electrical repulsion of so many protons overcame the "strong" nuclear force. Meitner also first realized that Einstein's famous equation, E = mc², explained the source of the tremendous releases of energy seen in atomic decay, by the conversion of the mass-defect into energy.
   A letter from Bohr, commenting on the fact that the amount of energy released when he bombarded uranium atoms was far larger than had been predicted by calculations based on a non-fissile core, had sparked the above inspiration in December 1938. Hahn claimed that his chemistry had been solely responsible for the discovery, although he'd been unable to explain the results.
   It was politically impossible for the exiled Meitner to publish jointly with Hahn in 1939. Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann had sent the manuscript of their paper to Naturwissenschaften in December 1938, reporting they'd detected the element barium after bombarding uranium with neutrons; simultaneously, they'd communicated their results to Meitner in a letter. Meitner, and her nephew Otto Robert Frisch, correctly interpreted their results as being nuclear fission. Frisch confirmed this experimentally on 13 January 1939.
   Meitner recognized the possibility for a chain reaction of enormous explosive potential. This report had an electrifying effect on the scientific community. Because this could be used as a weapon, and since the knowledge was in German hands, Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, and Eugene Wigner together jumped into action, persuading Albert Einstein, who had the celebrity, to write President Franklin D. Roosevelt a warning letter; this led directly to the establishment of the Manhattan Project. Meitner refused an offer to work on the project at Los Alamos, declaring "I will have nothing to do with a bomb!"
   Einstein himself respected Meitner and called her "our Marie Curie." In 1966 Hahn, Fritz Strassmann and Meitner together were awarded the Enrico Fermi Award. On a visit to the USA in 1946 she received American press celebrity treatment as someone who had "left Germany with the bomb in my purse." She was honoured as "Woman of the Year" by the National Women's Press Club (USA) in 1946, and received the Max Planck Medal of the German Physics Society in 1949. Meitner was suggested to receive the prize three times. An even rarer honour was given to her in 1997 with naming element 109 meitnerium in her honour.

Meitner became a Swedish citizen in 1949, but moved to Britain in 1960 and died in Cambridge in 1968, shortly before her 90th birthday. As was her wish, she was buried in the village of Bramley in Hampshire, at St. James parish church, close to her younger brother Walter, who had died in 1964. Her nephew Otto Robert Frisch composed the inscription on her headstone. It reads "Lise Meitner: a physicist who never lost her humanity."

Popular Culture

Besides the element named in her honor, there have been other mentions in popular culture:

In episode S01E09 of Eureka, the high school holds an annual dance that honors Lise Meitner, and says that Eureka strives to follow her ideals.

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