Leise Meitner

Lise Meitner

Born: November 7, 1878, Vienna, Austria

Died: October 27, 1968, Cambridge, UK

In December 1938. Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch concluded that a puzzling finding made by nuclear chemist Otto Hahn in Berlin was explained by nuclear fission, the splitting of an atom of Uranium. The result of this discovery led directly to the atomic bomb, and ultimately to the peril of global annihilation that we live with today. When Otto Hahn received the Nobel Prize in 1944 for this discovery, Meitner was not included in the award. Many scientists and journalists claimed that her treatment was unjust.

Elise Meitner was born into an intellectual Jewish family, the third of eight children of her father Philipp and mother Hedwig. Her father was a chess master and lawyer, one of the first Jews allowed to practice law in Austria. As an adult she converted to Christianity as a Lutheran, being baptized in 1908. Two of her sisters converted to Catholicism in the same year. She never married.

She became interested in science at a young age. From eight years old she kept a notebook of her scientific inquiries, including the colors of oil slicks on water, and the reflection of light. She completed high school in 1892. It was not until 1897 that Austria lifted its restrictions on the admission of women into institutes of higher education. Meitner studied for the qualifications necessary to enter university and entered the University of Vienna in 1901. She received her Ph.D. in Physics in 1906, only the second woman to earn a doctorate from the University of Vienna.

While at the University of Vienna she was asked to investigate an article on optics by Lord Rayleigh detailing an experiment that produced results Rayleigh had been unable to explain. She was able to explain the results, and made predictions based on her explanation, which she then verified experimentally, demonstrating her ability to carry out independent and unsupervised research.

In 1906, while engaged in this research, Meitner was introduced by Stefan Meyer to radioactivity, then a very new field of study. She started with alpha particles. In her experiments with collimators and metal foil, she found that scattering in a beam of alpha particles increased with the mass of the metal atoms. She published her findings leading Ernest Rutherford to predict the nuclear atom that proposed that most of an atom’s mass was concentrated at its center.

Since the only opportunities at that time in Vienna for a woman with her education was as a schoolteacher, Meitner travelled to Berlin seeking opportunities in scientific research. She obtained a position at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (KWI) when it was formed in 1912. Her work here centered on the bombarding of elements with neutrons, splitting them and interpreting the results. She was the first woman to become a full professor of physics in Germany and was head of the Physics section at KWI when in 1935 she was dismissed from her positions because of the NAZI anti-Jewish Nurenburg laws. She fled to Holland, then Sweden before settling in the UK in 1950.

During her time in Sweden, she communicated with Otto Hahn who was performing experiments with Uranium by bombarding it with neutrons. Hahn and his collaborator, Fritz Strassmann, discovered evidence of Barium in the Uranium after its bombardment, although they thought that it was Radium. Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch provided the explanation that it was probably Barium. They conjectured that the fission products of the isotope U235 would be Barium 139 and Krypton 95. They encouraged Hahn and Strassman to purify their experimental residue more carefully to look for these products. Frisch named the new nuclear process “fission” after learning that the term “binary fission” was used by biologists to describe cell division. They rapidly wrote up a one-page paper that was submitted to the journal Nature, in January 1939.

Hahn and Strassmann published their finding separately, and did not acknowledge Meitner’s role in the discovery.

Scientists quickly recognized that if the fission reaction also emitted enough secondary neutrons, a chain reaction could potentially occur, releasing enormous amounts of energy. Many scientists joined the efforts to produce an atomic bomb, but Meitner wanted no part of that work and was later greatly saddened by the fact that her discovery had led to such destructive weapons. She did continue her research on nuclear reactions and contributed to the construction of Sweden’s first nuclear reactor. Hahn won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1944, but Meitner was never recognized for her important role in the discovery of fission.

In her later life she suffered from poor health including a heart attack and atherosclerosis. She broke her hip in a fall and never fully recovered. She died in a nursing home and was buried in the village of Bramley, near her Walter. Her headstone carries the inscription composed by her nephew Frisch.

Lise Meitner: a physicist who never lost her humanity.