Lise Meitner

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Lise Meitner
Meitner in 1946
Born
Elise Meitner

(1878-11-07)7 November 1878
Vienna, Austria-Hungary
Died27 October 1968(1968-10-27) (aged 89)
Cambridge, England
Resting placeSt James' Church, Bramley, Hampshire
Citizenship
  • Austria (pre-1949)
  • Sweden (post-1949)
Alma materUniversity of Vienna (PhD, 1905)
Known for
Awards
Scientific career
Fields
  • radioactivity
Institutions
Thesis Prüfung einer Formel Maxwells  (1905)
Doctoral advisor
Other academic advisors
Doctoral students
Signature

Lise Meitner (

protactinium-231 in 1917. In 1938, Meitner and her nephew, the physicist Otto Robert Frisch, discovered nuclear fission. She was praised by Albert Einstein as the "German Marie Curie".[2]

Completing her doctoral research in 1905, Meitner became the second woman from the University of Vienna to earn a doctorate in physics. She spent most of her scientific career in Berlin, Germany, where she was a physics professor and a department head at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute; she was the first woman to become a full professor of physics in Germany. She lost these positions in the 1930s because of the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws of Nazi Germany, and in 1938 she fled to Sweden, where she lived for many years, ultimately becoming a Swedish citizen.

In mid-1938, Meitner with chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute found that bombarding thorium with neutrons produced different isotopes. Hahn and Strassmann later in the year showed that isotopes of barium could be formed by bombardment of uranium. In late December, Meitner and Frisch worked out the physics of such a splitting process. In their report in February issue of Nature in 1939, they gave it the name "fission". This principle led to the development of the first atomic bomb during World War II, and subsequently other nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors.

Meitner did not share the 1944

Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in 1962. She received many other honours, including the naming of chemical element 109 meitnerium
in 1997 after her death.

Early years

Meitner was born Elise Meitner on 7 November 1878 into a Jewish upper-middle-class family at the family home in 27 Kaiser Josefstraße in the

Catholic Christianity that same year.[8] She also adopted a shortened name "Lise".[9][10]

Education

Meitner in 1906

Meitner's earliest research began at age eight, when she kept a notebook of her records underneath her pillow. She was particularly drawn to mathematics and science, and first studied colours of an oil slick, thin films, and reflected light. Women were not allowed to attend public institutions of higher education in Vienna until 1897, and she completed her final year of school in 1892. Her education included bookkeeping, arithmetic, history, geography, science, French and gymnastics.[11]

The only career available to women was teaching, so she trained as a French teacher. Her sister Gisela passed the

Akademisches Gymnasium. Only four out of fourteen girls passed, including Meitner and Henriette Boltzmann, the daughter of physicist Ludwig Boltzmann.[12]

Meitner entered the

Olga Steindler who had received her degree in 1903; the third was Selma Freud, who worked in the same laboratory as Meitner, and received her doctorate later in 1906.[16] Meitner's thesis was published as Wärmeleitung in inhomogenen Körpern ("Thermal Conduction in Inhomogeneous Bodies") on 22 February 1906.[16][18]

Lord Rayleigh that detailed an experiment that produced results that Rayleigh had been unable to explain. She was not only able to explain what was going on; she went further and made predictions based on her explanation, and then verified them experimentally, demonstrating her ability to carry out independent and unsupervised research.[19]

While engaged in this research, Meitner was introduced by

nuclear atom. She submitted her findings to the Physikalische Zeitschrift on 29 June 1907.[19][20]

Friedrich Wilhelm University

Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn in 1912

Encouraged and backed by her father's financial support, Meitner went to the Friedrich Wilhelm University, where the renowned physicist Max Planck taught. Planck invited her to his home, and allowed her to attend his lectures, which was an unusual gesture by Planck, who was on the record as opposing the admission of women to universities in general, but he was willing to admit that there was the occasional exception; apparently he recognised Meitner as one of the exceptions.[21] She became friends with Planck's twin daughters Emma and Grete, who shared her love of music.[22]

Attending Planck's lectures did not take up all her time, and Meitner approached Heinrich Rubens, the head of the experimental physics institute, about doing some research. Rubens said that he would be happy for her to work in his laboratory. He also added that Otto Hahn at the chemistry institute was looking for a physicist to collaborate with. A few minutes later she was introduced to Hahn. He had studied radioactive substances under Sir William Ramsay, and in Montreal under Rutherford, and was already credited with the discovery of what were then thought to be several new radioactive elements.[23][24] (In fact, they were isotopes of known elements, but the concept of an isotope, along with the term, was only propounded by Frederick Soddy in 1913.[25]) Hahn was the same age as Meitner, and she noted his informal and approachable manner.[23][24] In Canada there had been no requirement to be circumspect when addressing the egalitarian New Zealander Rutherford, but many people in Germany found his manner off-putting, and characterised him as an "Anglicised Berliner".[26] In Montreal, Hahn had become accustomed to collaboration with physicists, including at least one woman, Harriet Brooks.[27]

Meitner and Hahn in their laboratory, in 1913. When a colleague she did not recognise said that they had met before, Meitner replied: "You probably mistake me for Professor Hahn."[28]

The head of the chemistry institute,

gamma rays. It was not possible to conduct research in the wood shop, but Alfred Stock, the head of the inorganic chemistry department, let Hahn use a space in one of his two private laboratories.[29] Like Meitner, Hahn was unpaid, and lived off an allowance from his father, although somewhat larger than hers. He completed his habilitation in the spring of 1907, and became a Privatdozent.[30] Most of the organic chemists at the chemistry institute did not regard Hahn's work—detecting minute traces of isotopes too small to see, weigh or smell through their radioactivity—as real chemistry.[24] One department head remarked that "it is incredible what one gets to be a Privatdozent these days!"[24]

The arrangement was difficult for Meitner at first. Women were not yet admitted to universities in

Robert Pohl, Max Planck, Peter Pringsheim [de] and Wilhelm Westphal.[31]

During the first years Meitner worked together with Hahn they co-authored three papers in 1908, and six more in 1909. She also, together with Hahn, discovered and developed a physical separation method known as radioactive recoil, in which a daughter nucleus is forcefully ejected from its matrix as it recoils at the moment of decay. While Hahn was more concerned with discovering new elements (now known to be

isotopes), Meitner was more concerned with understanding their radiations. She observed that radioactive recoil could be a new way of detecting radioactive substances. They set up some tests and soon discovered two more new isotopes.[32]

Meitner was particularly interested in

quantum physics.[33]

Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry

Gustav Hertz

In 1912, Hahn and Meitner moved to the newly founded

Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (KWI) for Chemistry. Hahn accepted an offer from Fischer to become a junior assistant in charge of its radiochemistry section, the first laboratory of its kind in Germany. The job came with the title of "professor" and a salary of 5,000 marks per annum. Meitner worked without salary as a "guest" in Hahn's section.[34] Later that year, perhaps fearing that Meitner was in financial difficulties and might return to Vienna, since her father had died in 1910, Planck appointed her his assistant at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in the Friedrich Wilhelm University. As such, she marked his students' papers. It was her first paid position. Assistant was the lowest rung on the academic ladder, and Meitner was the first female scientific assistant in Prussia.[34][28]

Proud officials presented Meitner to

mesothorium ("middle thorium", radium-228 also called "German radium") produced for medical purposes, for which Hahn received 66,000 marks in 1914, of which he gave ten per cent to Meitner.[36] In 1914, Meitner received an attractive offer of an academic position in Prague. Planck made it clear to Fischer that he didn't want Meitner to leave, and Fischer arranged for her salary to be doubled to 3,000 marks.[37]

The move to new accommodation was fortuitous, as the wood shop had become thoroughly contaminated by radioactive liquids that had been spilt, and radioactive gases that had vented and then decayed and settled as radioactive dust, making sensitive measurements impossible. To ensure that their clean new laboratories stayed that way, Hahn and Meitner instituted strict procedures. Chemical and physical measurements were conducted in different rooms, people handling radioactive substances had to follow protocols that included not shaking hands, and rolls of toilet paper were hung next to every telephone and door handle. Strongly radioactive substances were stored in the old wood shop, and later in a purpose-built radium house on the institute grounds.[37]

World War I and the discovery of protactinium

In July 1914—shortly before the outbreak of World War I in August—Hahn was called to active duty with the army in a Landwehr regiment.[38] Meitner undertook X-ray technician training, and a course on anatomy at the city hospital in Lichterfelde.[28] Meanwhile, she completed both the work on the beta ray spectrum that she had begun before the war with Hahn and Baeyer, and her own study of the uranium decay chain.[39] In July 1915, she returned to Vienna, where she joined the Austrian Army as an X-ray nurse-technician. Her unit was soon deployed to the Eastern front in Poland, and she also served on the Italian front for a while before being discharged in September 1916.[40]

Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry building in Berlin. Badly damaged by bombing during World War II, it was restored and became part of the Free University of Berlin in 1948. It was renamed the Otto Hahn Building in 1956, and the Hahn-Meitner Building in 2010.[41][42]

Meitner returned to the KWI for Chemistry and her research in October. In January 1917, she was appointed the head of her own physics section. The Hahn-Meitner Laboratory was divided into separate Hahn and Meitner Laboratories, and her pay was increased to 4,000 marks.

Kasimir Fajans and Oswald Helmuth Göhring discovered this element in 1913, and named it brevium after its short half-life. However, the isotope they had found was a beta emitter, and therefore could not be the mother isotope of actinium. This had to be another isotope of the same element.[44]

In 1914 Hahn and Meitner had developed a new technique for separating the tantalum group from

thorium-230.[44]

For this more pitchblende was required. Meitner went to Vienna, where she met with Stefan Meyer. The export of uranium from Austria was forbidden due to wartime restrictions, but Meyer was able to offer her a kilogram of uranium residue, pitchblende from which the uranium had been removed, which was actually better for her purpose. The indicator tests showed that the alpha activity was not due to these substances. All that now remained was to find evidence of actinium. For this more pitchblende was required, and this time Meyer was unable to assist, as the export was now prohibited. Meitner managed to obtain 100 g of "double residue"—pitchblende without uranium or radium—from Friedrich Oskar Giesel and began tests with 43 grams of it, but its composition was different, and at first her tests did not work. With Giesel's help, she was able to produce a pure product that was strongly radioactive. By December 1917 she was able to isolate both the mother isotope and its actinium daughter product. She submitted their findings for publication in March 1918.[44][45]

Although Fajans and Göhring had been the first to discover the element, custom required that an element was represented by its longest-lived and most abundant isotope, and brevium did not seem appropriate. Fajans agreed to Meitner naming the element "protoactinium" (subsequently shortened to protactinium), and assigning it the chemical symbol Pa. In June 1918, Soddy and John Cranston announced that they had independently extracted a sample of the isotope, but unlike Meitner they were unable to describe its characteristics. They acknowledged Meitner's priority, and agreed to the name. The connection to uranium remained a mystery, as neither of the known isotopes of uranium decayed into protactinium. It remained unsolved until the mother isotope, uranium-235, was discovered in 1929.[44]

Beta radiation

In 1921, Meitner accepted an invitation from

Jean Danysz, she examined the spectra of lead-210, radium-226 and thorium-238.[48] Meitner discovered the cause of the emission of electrons from surfaces of atoms with "signature" energies, now known as the Auger effect.[49][50] The effect is named for Pierre Victor Auger, who independently discovered it in 1923.[51][52]

At a conference in 1937, Meitner shares the front row with (left to right) Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, Otto Stern and Rudolf Ladenburg; Hilde Levi is the only other woman in the room.

Women were granted the right of habilitation in Prussia in 1920, and in 1922 Meitner was granted her habilitation and became a

Leó Szilárd.[55]

Meitner had a

rest mass. The idea was taken up by Enrico Fermi in his 1934 theory of beta decay, and he gave the name "neutrino" to the hypothetical neutral particle. At the time there was scant hope of detecting neutrinos, but in 1956 Clyde Cowan and Frederick Reines did just that.[47]

Nazi Germany

Adolf Hitler was sworn in as the Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933, as his Nazi Party (NSDAP) was now the largest party in the Reichstag (Weimar Republic).[59] The 7 April 1933 Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service removed Jews from the civil service, which included academia. Meitner never tried to conceal her Jewish descent, but initially was exempt from its impact on multiple grounds: she had been employed before 1914, had served in the military during the World War, was an Austrian rather than a German citizen, and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute was a government-industry partnership.[60] However, she was dismissed from her adjunct professorship on 6 September on the grounds that her World War I service was not at the front, and she had not completed her habilitation until 1922. This had no effect on her salary or work at the KWI for Chemistry.[61] Carl Bosch, the director of IG Farben, a major sponsor of the KWI for Chemistry, assured Meitner that her position there was safe.[60] Although Hahn and Meitner remained in charge, their assistants, Otto Erbacher and Kurt Philipp respectively, who were both NSDAP members, were given increasing influence over the day-to-day running of the institute.[62]

Others were not so fortunate; her nephew

Springer-Verlag fired Berliner.[67]

Transmutation

After Chadwick discovered the

Frédéric Joliot irradiated aluminium foil with alpha particles, and found that this results in a short-lived radioactive isotope of phosphorus. They noted that positron emission continued after the neutron emissions ceased. Not only had they discovered a new form of radioactive decay, they had transmuted an element into a hitherto unknown radioactive isotope of another, thereby inducing radioactivity where there had been none before. Radiochemistry was now no longer confined to certain heavy elements, but extended to the entire periodic table.[69][70] Chadwick noted that being electrically neutral, neutrons could penetrate the atomic nucleus more easily than protons or alpha particles.[71] Enrico Fermi and his colleagues in Rome picked up on this idea,[72] and began irradiating elements with neutrons.[73]

The radioactive displacement law of Fajans and Soddy said that beta decay causes isotopes to move one element up on the periodic table, and alpha decay causes them to move two down. When Fermi's group bombarded uranium atoms with neutrons, they found a complex mix of half lives. Fermi therefore concluded that the new elements with atomic numbers greater than 92 (known as

transuranium elements) had been created.[73] Meitner and Hahn had not collaborated for many years, but Meitner was eager to investigate Fermi's results. Hahn, initially, was not, but he changed his mind when Aristid von Grosse suggested that what Fermi had found was an isotope of protactinium.[74] "The only question", Hahn later wrote, "seemed to be whether Fermi had found isotopes of transuranium elements, or isotopes of the next-lower element, protactinium. At that time Lise Meitner and I decided to repeat Fermi's experiments in order to find out whether the 13-minute isotope was a protactinium isotope or not. It was a logical decision, having been the discoverers of protactinium."[75]

Between 1934 and 1938, Hahn, Meitner, and Strassmann found a great number of radioactive transmutation products, all of which they regarded as transuranic.

platinoids. They established the presence of multiple isotopes of at least four such elements, and (mistakenly) identified them as elements with atomic numbers 93 through 96. They were the first scientists to measure the 23-minute half life of the synthetic radioisotope uranium-239 and to establish chemically that it was an isotope of uranium, but with their weak neutron sources they were unable to continue this work to its logical conclusion and identify the real element 93.[77] They identified ten different half lives, with varying degrees of certainty. To account for them, Meitner had to hypothesise a new class of reaction and the alpha decay of uranium, neither of which had ever been reported before, and for which physical evidence was lacking. Hahn and Strassmann refined their chemical procedures, while Meitner devised new experiments to shine more light on the reaction processes.[77]

In May 1937, Hahn and Meitner issued parallel reports, one in Zeitschrift für Physik with Meitner as the first author, and one in Chemische Berichte with Hahn as the first author.

nuclear isomerism that Hahn had discovered in protactinium years before. She therefore ended her report on a very different note to Hahn, reporting that: "The process must be neutron capture by uranium-238, which leads to three isomeric nuclei of uranium-239. This result is very difficult to reconcile with current concepts of the nucleus."[78][80]

Escape from Germany

With the Anschluss, Germany's unification with Austria on 12 March 1938, Meitner lost her Austrian citizenship.[81] Niels Bohr extended an offer to lecture in Copenhagen, and Paul Scherrer invited her to attend a congress in Switzerland, with all expenses paid. Carl Bosch still said that she could remain at the KWI for Chemistry, but by May she was aware that the Reich Ministry of Science, Education and Culture was looking into her case. On 9 May, she decided to accept Bohr's invitation to go to Copenhagen, where Frisch worked,[82] but when she went to the Danish consulate to get a travel visa, she was told that Denmark no longer recognised her Austrian passport as valid. She could not leave for Denmark, Switzerland or any other country.[83]

Bohr came to Berlin in June, and was gravely concerned. When he returned to Copenhagen, he began looking for a position for Meitner in Scandinavia. He also asked

International Federation of University Women had been flooded with applications for support from Austria. On 27 June, Meitner received an offer of a one-year position at Manne Siegbahn's new laboratory [sv] in Stockholm, then under construction, which would be devoted to nuclear physics, and she decided to accept it. But on 4 July she learned that academics would no longer be granted permission to travel abroad.[84]

Meitner lived at this address for most of her years while in Sweden.

Through Bohr in Copenhagen, Peter Debye communicated with Coster and Fokker, and they approached the Netherlands Ministry of Education with an appeal to allow Meitner to come to the Netherlands. As foreigners were not allowed to work for pay, an appointment as a non-salaried privaat-docente was required. Wander Johannes de Haas and Anton Eduard van Arkel arranged for one at Leiden University.[85] Coster also spoke to the head of the border guards, who assured him that Meitner would be admitted. A friend of Coster, E. H. Ebels, was a local politician from the border area, and he spoke directly to the guards on the border.[86]

On 11 July, Coster arrived in Berlin, where he stayed with Debye.[86] The following morning, Meitner arrived early at the KWI for Chemistry, and Hahn briefed her on the plan. To avoid suspicion, she maintained her usual routine, remaining at the institute until 20:00 correcting one of the associate's papers for publication. Hahn and Paul Rosbaud helped her pack two small suitcases, carrying only summer clothes. Hahn gave her a diamond ring he had inherited from his mother in case of emergency; she took only 10 marks in her purse. She then spent the night at Hahn's house. The next morning Meitner met Coster at the train station, where they pretended to have met each other by chance. They travelled on a lightly used line to Bad Nieuweschans railway station on the border, which they crossed without incident;[87] the German border guards may have thought that Frau Professor was the wife of a professor.[88] A telegram from Pauli informed Coster that he was now "as famous for the abduction of Lise Meitner as for the discovery of hafnium".[89]

Meitner learned on 26 July that Sweden had granted her permission to enter on her Austrian passport, and two days later she flew to Copenhagen, where she was greeted by Frisch, and stayed with Niels and

Göteborg station by Eva von Bahr. They took a train, and then a steamer to von Bahr's home in Kungälv, where she stayed until September.[90] Hahn told everyone at the KWI for Chemistry that Meitner had gone to Vienna to visit her relatives, and a few days later the institute had closed for the summer vacation. On 23 August, she wrote to Bosch requesting retirement.[91] He tried to ship her belongings to Sweden, but the Reich Ministry of Education insisted they remain in Germany.[92]

Meitner was also concerned about her family back in Austria. One of her first actions in Sweden was to apply for a Swedish immigration permit for Gusti and her husband Justinian (Jutz) Frisch.[92] Hahn selected Josef Mattauch to replace her as head of the physics section, and went to Vienna to offer him the job. While there he dined with Meitner's sisters Gusti and Gisela and their husbands Jutz Frisch and Karl Lion on 9 November. The next day Gusti informed him that Jutz Frisch had been arrested. That day, Meitner arrived in Copenhagen; arranging a travel visa had been difficult with her invalid Austrian passport. Hahn joined her in Copenhagen on 13 November, and had discussions about the uranium research with Meitner, Bohr and Otto Robert Frisch. The physicists, particularly Meitner, told him that the results of the experiments, particularly the supposed discovery of isomers of radium, could not be correct, and the experiments would have to be re-done.[93]

Nuclear fission

Main article: Discovery of nuclear fission
This was touted for many years as the table and experimental apparatus with which Otto Hahn discovered nuclear fission in 1938. The table and instruments are representative of the ones used, but not necessarily the originals, and would not have been together on the one table in the same room. Pressure from historians, scientists and feminists caused the museum to alter the display in 1988 to acknowledge the role of Meitner, Frisch and Strassmann.[94]

Hahn and Strassmann isolated the three radium isotopes (verified by their half-lives) and used fractional crystallisation to separate it from its barium carrier by adding barium bromide crystals in four steps. Since radium precipitates preferentially in a solution of barium bromide, at each step the fraction drawn off would contain less radium than the one before. However, they found no difference between each of the fractions. In case their process was faulty in some way, they verified it with known isotopes of radium; the process was fine. On 19 December, Hahn wrote to Meitner, informing her that the radium isotopes behaved chemically like barium. Anxious to finish up before the Christmas break, Hahn and Strassmann submitted their findings to Naturwissenschaften on 22 December without waiting for Meitner to reply.[95] Hahn concluded the paper with: "As chemists... we should substitute the symbols Ba, La, Ce for Ra, Ac, Th. As 'nuclear chemists' fairly close to physics we cannot yet bring ourselves to take this step which contradicts all previous experience in physics."[96]

Frisch normally celebrated Christmas with Meitner in Berlin, but in 1938 she accepted an invitation from Eva von Bahr to spend it with her family at Kungälv, and Meitner asked Frisch to join her there. Meitner received the letter from Hahn describing his chemical proof that some of the product of the bombardment of uranium with neutrons was barium. Barium had an atomic mass 40% less than uranium, and no previously known methods of radioactive decay could account for such a large difference in the mass of the nucleus.[97][98] Nonetheless, she had immediately written back to Hahn to say: "At the moment the assumption of such a thoroughgoing breakup seems very difficult to me, but in nuclear physics we have experienced so many surprises, that one cannot unconditionally say: 'It is impossible.'"[99]

According to Frisch:

Was it a mistake? No, said Lise Meitner; Hahn was too good a chemist for that. But how could barium be formed from uranium? No larger fragments than protons or helium nuclei (alpha particles) had ever been chipped away from nuclei, and to chip off a large number not nearly enough energy was available. Nor was it possible that the uranium nucleus could have been cleaved right across. A nucleus was not like a brittle solid that can be cleaved or broken; George Gamow had suggested early on, and Bohr had given good arguments that a nucleus was much more like a liquid drop. Perhaps a drop could divide itself into two smaller drops in a more gradual manner, by first becoming elongated, then constricted, and finally being torn rather than broken in two? We knew that there were strong forces that would resist such a process, just as the surface tension of an ordinary liquid drop tends to resist its division into two smaller ones. But nuclei differed from ordinary drops in one important way: they were electrically charged, and that was known to counteract the surface tension.

At that point we both sat down on a tree trunk (all that discussion had taken place while we walked through the wood in the snow, I with my skis on, Lise Meitner making good her claim that she could walk just as fast without), and started to calculate on scraps of paper. The charge of a uranium nucleus, we found, was indeed large enough to overcome the effect of the surface tension almost completely; so the uranium nucleus might indeed resemble a very wobbly unstable drop, ready to divide itself at the slightest provocation, such as the impact of a single neutron.

But there was another problem. After separation, the two drops would be driven apart by their mutual electric repulsion and would acquire high speed and hence a very large energy, about 200 MeV in all; where could that energy come from? Fortunately Lise Meitner remembered the empirical formula for computing the masses of nuclei and worked out that the two nuclei formed by the division of a uranium nucleus together would be lighter than the original uranium nucleus by about one-fifth the mass of a proton. Now whenever mass disappears energy is created, according to Einstein's formula E = mc2, and one-fifth of a proton mass was just equivalent to 200 MeV. So here was the source for that energy; it all fitted![100]

Exhibition to mark the 75th anniversary of the discovery of nuclear fission, at the Vienna International Centre in 2013. The table (on loan from the Deutsches Museum Munich) is now described as a replica and images of Meitner and Strassmann are prominently displayed.

Meitner and Frisch had correctly interpreted Hahn's results to mean that the nucleus of uranium had split roughly in half. The first two reactions that the Berlin group had observed were light elements created by the breakup of uranium nuclei; the third, the 23-minute one, was a decay into the real element 93.[101] On returning to Copenhagen, Frisch informed Bohr, who slapped his forehead and exclaimed "What idiots we have been!"[102] Bohr promised not to say anything until they had a paper ready for publication. To speed the process, they decided to submit a one-page note to Nature. At this point, the only evidence that they had was the barium. Logically, if barium was formed, the other element must be krypton,[103] although Hahn mistakenly believed that the atomic masses had to add up to 239 rather than the atomic numbers adding up to 92, and thought it was masurium (technetium), and so did not check for it:[104]

235
92U + n →
56Ba +
36Kr + some n

Over a series of long-distance phone calls, Meitner and Frisch came up with a simple experiment to bolster their claim: to measure the recoil of the fission fragments, using a Geiger counter with the threshold set above that of the alpha particles. Frisch conducted the experiment on 13 January, and found the pulses caused by the reaction just as they had predicted.[103] He decided he needed a name for the newly discovered nuclear process. He spoke to William A. Arnold, an American biologist working with de Hevesy, and asked him what biologists called the process by which living cells divided into two cells. Arnold told him that biologists called it fission. Frisch then applied that name to the nuclear process in his paper.[105] Frisch mailed both papers to Nature on 16 January; the jointly-authored note appeared in print on 11 February and Frisch's paper on recoil on 18 February.[106][107]

These three reports, the first Hahn-Strassmann publications of 6 January and 10 February 1939, and the Frisch-Meitner publication of 11 February 1939, had electrifying effects on the scientific community.[108] In 1940 Frisch and Rudolf Peierls produced the Frisch–Peierls memorandum, which established that an atomic explosion could be generated.[109]

Nobel Prize for nuclear fission

Despite the many honours that Meitner received in her lifetime, she did not receive the Nobel Prize while it was awarded to Otto Hahn for the discovery of nuclear fission. She was nominated 49 times for Physics and Chemistry Nobel Prizes but never won.[110] On 15 November 1945, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that Hahn had been awarded the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for "his discovery of the fission of heavy atomic nuclei".[111] Meitner was the one who told Hahn and Strassman to test their radium in more detail, and it was she who told Hahn that it was possible for the nucleus of uranium to disintegrate. Without these contributions of Meitner, Hahn would not have found that the uranium nucleus can split in half.[112]

In 1945 the Nobel Committee for Chemistry in Sweden that selected the Nobel Prize in Chemistry decided to award that prize solely to Hahn: Hahn only found out from a newspaper while interned in Farm Hall Cambridgeshire England. In the 1990s, the long-sealed records of the Nobel Committee's proceedings became public, and the comprehensive biography of Meitner published in 1996 by Ruth Lewin Sime took advantage of this unsealing to reconsider Meitner's exclusion.[113][114] In a 1997 article in the American Physical Society journal Physics Today, Sime and her colleagues Elisabeth Crawford and Mark Walker wrote:

It appears that Lise Meitner did not share the 1944 prize because the structure of the Nobel committees was ill-suited to assess interdisciplinary work; because the members of the chemistry committee were unable or unwilling to judge her contribution fairly; and because during the war the Swedish scientists relied on their own limited expertise. Meitner's exclusion from the chemistry award may well be summarized as a mixture of disciplinary bias, political obtuseness, ignorance, and haste.[114]

The five-member physics committee included Manne Siegbahn, his former student Erik Hulthén, the professor of experimental physics at Uppsala University, and Axel Lindh, who eventually succeeded Hulthén. All three were part of the Siegbahn school of x-ray spectroscopy. The poor relationship between Siegbahn and Meitner was a factor here, as was the bias towards experimental rather than theoretical physics. In his report on the work of Meitner and Frisch, Hulthén relied on pre-war papers. He did not think that their work was groundbreaking, and argued that the prize for physics was given for experimental rather than theoretical work, which had not been the case for many years.[114]

At the time Meitner herself 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."

Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in 1962.[119]
Max Perutz, the 1962 Nobel prizewinner in chemistry, reached a similar conclusion: "Having been locked up in the Nobel Committee's files these fifty years, the documents leading to this unjust award now reveal that the protracted deliberations by the Nobel jury were hampered by lack of appreciation both of the joint work that had preceded the discovery and of Meitner's written and verbal contributions after her flight from Berlin."[120][121]

Later life

Meitner with actress Katharine Cornell and physicist Arthur Compton on 6 June 1946

Meitner found that Siegbahn did not want her. At the time the offer to come to Sweden had been extended, he had said that he had no money, and could only offer Meitner a place to work. Eva von Bahr had then written to Carl Wilhelm Oseen, who had provided money from the Nobel Foundation. This left her with laboratory space, but now she had to perform herself work that for the previous twenty years she had been able to delegate to her laboratory technicians.[122] Ruth Lewin Sime wrote that:

In Sweden there was no general sympathy for refugees from Nazi Germany: the country was small, with a weak economy and no immigrant tradition, and its academic culture had always been firmly pro-German, a tradition that did not change much until the middle of the war when it became obvious that Germany would not win. During the war, members of Siegbahn's group saw Meitner as an outsider, withdrawn and depressed; they did not understand the displacement and anxiety common to all refugees, or the trauma of losing friends and relatives to the Holocaust, or the exceptional isolation of a woman who had single mindedly devoted her life to her work.[122]

On 14 January 1939, Meitner learned that her brother-in-law Jutz had been released from

Second World War broke out in September 1939 before she could make the move.[126]

In Sweden, Meitner continued her research as best she could. She measured the

Los Alamos Laboratory, declaring "I will have nothing to do with a bomb!"[130] She later said that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had come as a surprise to her, and that she was "sorry that the bomb had to be invented".[131] After the war, Meitner acknowledged her own moral failing in staying in Germany from 1933 to 1938. She wrote: "It was not only stupid but very wrong that I did not leave at once."[132] She not only regretted her inaction during this period, she was also bitterly critical of Hahn, Max von Laue, Werner Heisenberg
, and other German scientists. In a June 1945 letter addressed to Hahn, but that he never received, she wrote:

You all worked for Nazi Germany. And you did not even try passive resistance. Granted, to absolve your conscience you helped some oppressed person here and there, but millions of innocent human beings were murdered and there was no protest. Here in neutral Sweden, long before the end of the war, there was discussion of what should be done with German scholars once the war is over. What then must the English and Americans be thinking? I and many others are of the opinion that the one path for you would be to deliver an open statement that you are aware that through your passivity you share responsibility for what has happened, and that you have the need to work for what can be done to make amends. But many think it is too late for that. These people say that first you betrayed your friends, then your men and your children in that you let them stake their lives on a criminal war – and finally that you betrayed Germany itself, because when the war was already quite hopeless, you never once spoke out against the meaningless destruction of Germany. That sounds pitiless but nevertheless I believe that the reason I write this to you is true friendship. In the last few days one had heard of the unbelievably gruesome things in the concentration camps; it overwhelms everything one previously feared. When I heard on English radio a very detailed report by the English and Americans about

Buchenwald, I began to cry out loud and lay awake all night. And if you had seen those people who were brought here from the camps. One should take a man like Heisenberg and millions like him, and force them to look at these camps and the martyred people. The way he turned up in Denmark in 1941 is unforgettable.[132]

In the aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima, Meitner found that she had become a celebrity. She had a radio interview with

Major General Leslie Groves. She spoke at Smith College, and went to Chicago, where she met Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller, Victor Weisskopf and Leo Szilard.[134] On 8 July, Meitner boarded the RMS Queen Mary for England, where she met with Erwin Schrödinger, Wolfgang Pauli and Max Born. There were belated celebrations for the 300th birthday of Isaac Newton, but the only German invited to attend was Max Planck.[135]

Meitner with students on the steps of the chemistry building at Bryn Mawr College in April 1959

For her friends in Sweden, Siegbahn's obstruction of Meitner's Nobel Prize was the final straw, and they resolved to get her a better position. In 1947, Meitner moved to the

Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, where Gudmund Borelius [sv] established a new facility for atomic research. There had been scant nuclear physics research in Sweden, which was blamed on Siegbahn's lack of support for Meitner's work, and now such knowledge seemed vital for Sweden's future. At the KTH, Meitner had three rooms, two assistants, and access to technicians, with the amiable Sigvard Eklund occupying the room next door. The intention was that Meitner would have the salary and title of a "research professor"—one without teaching duties.[136]

The professorship fell through when the Minister for Education, Tage Erlander, unexpectedly became the Prime Minister of Sweden, but Borelius and Klein ensured that she had the salary of a professor, if not the title.[137] In 1949, she became a Swedish citizen, but without surrendering her Austrian citizenship thanks to a special act passed by the Riksdag. Plans were approved for R1, Sweden's first nuclear reactor in 1947, with Eklund as the project director, and Meitner worked with him on its design and construction. In her last scientific papers in 1950 and 1951, she applied magic numbers to nuclear fission.[137] She retired in 1960 and moved to the UK where most of her relatives were, although she continued working part-time and giving lectures.[138]

In the 1950s and 1960s, Meitner enjoyed visiting Germany and staying with Hahn and his family for several days on different occasions.[139] Hahn wrote in his memoirs that he and Meitner had remained lifelong close friends.[140] Even though their friendship was full of trials, arguably more so experienced by Meitner, she "never voiced anything but deep affection for Hahn".[141] On occasions such as their 70th, 75th, 80th and 85th birthdays, they addressed recollections in each other's honour. Hahn emphasised Meitner's intellectual productivity, and work such as her research on the nuclear shell model, always passing over the reasons for her move to Sweden as quickly as possible. She emphasised Hahn's personal qualities, his charm and musical ability.[139]

Meitner's grave in Bramley, Hampshire

A strenuous trip to the United States in 1964 led to Meitner's having a heart attack, from which she spent several months recovering. Her physical and mental condition weakened by atherosclerosis. After breaking her hip in a fall and suffering several small strokes in 1967, Meitner made a partial recovery, but eventually was weakened to the point where she moved into a Cambridge nursing home.[142] Meitner died in her sleep on 27 October 1968 at the age of 89. Meitner was not informed of the deaths of Otto Hahn on 28 July 1968 or his wife Edith on 14 August, as her family believed it would be too much for someone so frail.[143] 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.[144] Her nephew Frisch composed the inscription on her headstone. It reads:

Lise Meitner: a physicist who never lost her humanity.[144]

Awards and honours

Statue of Meitner by Anna Franziska Schwarzbach [de] at Humboldt University of Berlin

Meitner was praised by

University of Stockholm in Sweden.[146]

In September 1966 the

Glenn Seaborg, the discoverer of plutonium, presented it to her in the home of Max Perutz in Cambridge on 23 October 1966.[157]

Bust of Meitner by Thomas Baumann at the University of Vienna

After her death in 1968, Meitner received many naming honours. In 1997, the element 109 was named

6999 Meitner.[163] In 2000, the European Physical Society established the biannual "Lise Meitner Prize" for excellent research in nuclear science.[164] In 2006 the "Gothenburg Lise Meitner Award" was established by the University of Gothenburg and Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden; it is awarded annually to a scientist who has made a breakthrough in physics.[165] In October 2010, the building at the Free University of Berlin that had once housed the KWI for Chemistry, and was known as the Otto Hahn Building since 1956, was renamed the Hahn-Meitner Building,[166] and in July 2014 a statue of Meitner was unveiled in the garden of the Humboldt University of Berlin next to similar statues of Hermann von Helmholtz and Max Planck.[167]

Schools and streets were named after her in many cities in Austria and Germany,

Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy in the United States named a major nuclear energy research program after her.[174] On 6 November 2020, a satellite named after her (ÑuSat 16 or "Lise", COSPAR 2020-079H) was launched into space.[175] The International Atomic Energy Agency named its library[176] in her honour and established a programme[177] to "provide early- and mid‑career women professionals with opportunities to participate in a multiweek visiting professional programme and advance their technical and soft skills".[177]

Notes

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References

Further reading

External links

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