Lise Meitner

Lise Meitner
Meitner in 1946
Born	Elise Meitner (1878-11-07)7 November 1878 Vienna, Austria-Hungary
Died	27 October 1968(1968-10-27) (aged 89) Cambridge, England
Resting place	St James' Church, Bramley, Hampshire
Citizenship	Austria (pre-1949) Sweden (post-1949)
Alma mater	University of Vienna (PhD, 1905)
Known for	Discovery of protactinium Discovery of nuclear fission Auger–Meitner effect Meitner–Hupfeld effect
Awards	Lieben Prize (1925) Max Planck Medal (1949) Otto Hahn Prize (1955) ForMemRS (1955) Wilhelm Exner Medal (1960) Enrico Fermi Award (1966)
Scientific career
Fields	Nuclear physics radioactivity
Institutions	Kaiser Wilhelm Institute University of Berlin, Manne Siegbahn Laboratory [sv] University College of Stockholm
Thesis	Prüfung einer Formel Maxwells  (1905)
Doctoral advisor	Franz S. Exner Hans Benndorf
Other academic advisors	Ludwig Boltzmann Max Planck
Doctoral students	Arnold Flammersfeld Kan-Chang Wang Max Delbrück Nikolaus Riehl
Signature

Lise Meitner (/ˈliːzə ˈmaɪtnər/ LEE-zə MYTE-nər, German: [ˈliːzə ˈmaɪtnɐ] ^ⓘ; born Elise Meitner, 7 November 1878 – 27 October 1968) was a Jewish-Austrian physicist who was one of those responsible for the discovery of the element protactinium and would jointly confirm that nuclear fission was a replicable process within physics.^[1] While working on radioactivity at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Chemistry in Berlin, she discovered the radioactive isotope protactinium-231 in 1917.

Completing her doctoral research in 1905, Meitner became the second woman from the University of Vienna to earn a doctorate in physics. She spent much 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 her positions because of the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws in 1935, within what was now Nazi Germany. On 13-14 July 1938, she fled to Holland with the help of Dirk Coster after the Anschluss due to having her passport revoked for being Jewish, and then continued onto Stockholm, Sweden.^[2] Meitner lived for many years in Sweden, ultimately becoming a Swedish citizen in 1949, but would relocate to Britain to be with other family members in the 1950s.

In mid-1938, Meitner along with chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry found that bombarding thorium with neutrons produced different isotopes. This process of isotopic seperation was called the Szilard-Chalmers effect, published in 1934, which itself utilised earlier discoveries of Enrico Fermi, Irene Joliot-Curie and her husband Frederic Joliot-Curie. Hahn and Strassmann later that year demonstrated that isotopes of barium could be formed by bombardment of uranium, as on 19 December 1938, Hahn and Strassman decided to bombard uranium with neutrons for the first time; however, Hahn and Strassmann misinterpreted their findings. Meitner was informed of their findings by Hahn later that very night in Sweden, and in late December, Meitner and her nephew, fellow physicist Otto Robert Frisch, worked out the physics of such a splitting process by correctly re-interpreting the theoretical data of Hahn and Strassmann whilst Frisch was visiting Meitner in Sweden.^[2]

On Friday, 13 January 1939, utilising the theoretical re-interpretation Meitner had concluded with Frisch in Sweden, Frisch would replicate the process Hahn and Strassmann had observed, and conlcuded over three days of expirements that nuclear fission was indeed replicable.^[2] This subsequientally also confirmed an earlier theory of Leo Szilard: by bombarding an (as yet unknown to Szilard) element with neutrons, one could split the atomic nuclei and thus create massive amounts of enegry. Szilard's theory was in contrast to Ernest Rutherford, the 'father of physics', declaration in 1933 that "anyone who looked for a source of power in the transformation of the atoms was talking moonshine".^[3] Meitner had been aware of Szilard's theory since mid-1933 after Szilard, who was a Jewish-Hungarian scientist at Berlin University, fled Nazi Germany immediately after the NSDAP took power.^[3] In Meitner and Frisch's report published in the February issue of Nature 1939, they gave it the name "fission" after a remark by biochemist Dr. William A. Arnold to Frisch on 22 January and after consulting Danish physicist Neils Bohr at whose research institute in Copenhagen that Frisch had been working in for many years. This discovery of a physics principle led to the development of the first atomic bomb during World War II, and subsequently other nuclear weapons, but also to the invention of nuclear reactors to generate power as Szilard had always invisioned.

Meitner did not share the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for nuclear fission, which was awarded exclusively to her long-time collaborator Otto Hahn. Several scientists and journalists have called her exclusion "unjust". According to the Nobel Prize archive, she was nominated 19 times for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry between 1924 and 1948, and 30 times for the Nobel Prize in Physics between 1937 and 1967. Despite not having been awarded the Nobel Prize, Meitner was invited to attend the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in 1962. She received many other honours, including the naming of chemical element 109 meitnerium in 1997 after her death. Meitner was praised by Albert Einstein as the "German Marie Curie".^[4]