Out of the 177 individuals who have won the Nobel Prize in chemistry, the name Lise Meitner is conspicuously absent. It is a name you’ve most likely never heard before, although you may recognize the name of her collaborator, Otto Hahn. Hahn was given credit for their shared discovery of nuclear fission, winning the Nobel Prize in 1944. Lise Meitner’s name was absent from the prize, and she received no part of it.
Dr. Meitner, of course, discovered far more than nuclear fission, although that was arguably one of her most important contributions to her field. She led a long and distinct career, backed by education from and collaboration with the world’s most influential physicists.
She began her career studying physics at the University of Vienna, learning under the physicist Ludwig Boltzmann. She became only the second womanto earn a doctorate from the university. Following the completion of her PhD, Meitner travelled to Berlin, where Max Planck allowed her to attend his lecturesand later to work as his assistant. Her contributions to the scientific community started quickly, when she and Otto Hahn discovered several new isotopes; she and Hahn later discovered a long-lived isotope of protactinium, an element that scientists had previously been unsuccessful in isolating stable isotopes for. For this, she was awarded the Leibniz Medal by the Berlin Academy of Sciences, and was later awarded her own physics sectionat the Kaiser Wilhem Institute of Chemistry, where she worked. Meitner later discovered the Auger effect—an effect named, not for her, but for a French scientist who independently discovered the same effect a year later. In 1926, Meitner became a full professor in physicsat the University of Berlin, making her the first woman in Germany to hold such a position in her field.
Lise Meitner teaching physics. Image courtesy of atomicarchive.com
Meitner’s work hit a dramatic snag with the onset of WWII. A practicing Christian, though of Jewish descent, Meitner was eventually forced to flee Germany. Her escape was organized by a number of her colleagues, including Otto Hahn and prominent physicist Niels Bohr. She found refuge in Stockholm and continued her research, corresponding with Hahn all the while as he continued their investigations into creating heavier elements. When Hahn wrote to her describing a recent experiment in which uranium had “burst,”creating barium, Meitner quickly grasped the physics of what Hahn had observed. It was from her calculations on the subject that she realized the energy that could be created by splitting atoms, and she quickly wrote a series of papers on the subject and published them in the scientific journal, Nature.
Nuclear fission was the process that made the development of nuclear weapons possible, although Meitner herself disapproved of the creation of a nuclear bomb. When offered a position working on the Manhattan Project, she declined, saying that she would have “nothing to do with a bomb.” Meitner strongly criticized the German scientists who had stayed and collaborated with the Nazis, including her own collaborator and friend Otto Hahn.
Lise Mietner (left) and her long-time collaborator, the chemist Otto Hahn (right).
Meitner continued her investigations into physics even after the end of WWII. She continued living in Sweden and refused to return to Germany—in large part because of her encounters with freed concentration camp victims. Meitner continued her successful career, conducting research on Sweden’s first nuclear reactor. She received the “Woman of the Year”award from the National Press Club in 1946. A year later, she received the Award of the City of Vienna for science, and received the Max Planck Medal of the German Physics Societyjust two years later. She, Hahn, and their other research associate, Fritz Strassmann, were jointly awarded the Enrico Fermi Award in 1966. In 1997, years after her death, she was honored with the discovery of element 109, named meitnerium in her honor.
Lise Meitner’s contributions to physics were immensely significant. Her discoveries literally shaped the world as we know it. Her condemnation for her colleagues who continued to work in Nazi Germany and her personal, hard stance against the creation and use of nuclear weapons made her as much of an admirable person as she was an admirable scientist. Perhaps the most accurate summary of Lise Meitner comes in the inscription on her headstone. Composed by her nephew, it reads simply:
“Lise Meitner: a physicist who never lost her humanity.”