Lise Meitner

Infobox Scientist
box_width = 300px
name = Lise Meitner

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image_size = 300px
caption = Lise Meitner (1878-1968), photo taken in 1900.
birth_date = 17 November 1878
birth_place = Vienna, Austria
death_date = death date and age|df=yes|1968|10|27|1878|11|7
death_place = Cambridge, England
residence = Austria, Germany, Sweden
United Kingdom
citizenship = Austria (pre-1949), Sweden (post-1949)
nationality =
ethnicity = Jewish
fields = Physicist
workplaces = Kaiser Wilhelm Institute
University of Berlin
alma_mater = University of Vienna
doctoral_advisor = Ludwig Boltzmann
academic_advisors = Max Planck
doctoral_students = Arnold Flammersfeld
Kan-Chang Wang
Nikolaus Riehl
notable_students = Max Delbrück
Hans Hellmann
known_for = Nuclear fission
author_abbrev_bot =
author_abbrev_zoo =
influences =
influenced = Otto Hahn
awards = Lieben Prize (1925)
Max Planck Medal (1949)
nowrap|Enrico Fermi Award (1966)
religion = Judaism (pre-1908)
Lutheran (post-1908)


footnotes = She was the aunt of Otto Robert Frisch. Her father was Philipp Meitner.

Lise Meitner (7 or 17 November 1878 – 27 October 1968) was an Austrian-born, later Swedish physicist who studied radioactivity and nuclear physics.cite news |first= |last= |authorlink= |coauthors= |title=Lise Meitner Dies; Atomic Pioneer, 89. Lise Meitner, Physicist, Is Dead. Paved Way for Splitting of Atom. |url=http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F30A11F83455157493CAAB178BD95F4C8685F9 |quote=Dr. Lise Meitner, the Austrian born nuclear physicist who first calculated the enormous energy released by splitting the uranium atom, died today in a Cambridge nursing home. She was 89 years old. |publisher=The New York Times |date= 28 October 1968 |accessdate=2008-04-18 ]

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 overlooked by the Nobel committee.cite news | title = No Nobel Prize for Whining | quote=Lise Meitner, the physicist first to recognize that experiments reported by two former colleagues in Berlin meant that atoms had been split, never got a prize, even though one of those colleagues, Otto Hahn, did in 1944. | author = Judson, Horace | date = 2003-10-20 | url = http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=9C02E4DE123EF933A15753C1A9659C8B63 | publisher = "New York Times" | accessdate = 2007-08-03 ] cite web | title = Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner and Fritz Strassmann | url = http://www.chemheritage.org/classroom/chemach/atomic/hahn-meitner.html | publisher = "Chemistry Heritage" | accessdate = 2007-08-03 ] cite web | title = The Woman Behind the Bomb | url = http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/reviews/lisemeitner.htm | publisher = "Washington Post" | accessdate = 2007-08-03 ] 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.cite news | title =Revelations Concerning Lisa Meitner And The Nobel Prize. | url = http://scienceweek.com/2004/rmps-32.htm | publisher = "Science Week" | accessdate = 2007-08-03 ]

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,cite web | title = Associated Papers of Lise Meitner | url = http://janus.lib.cam.ac.uk/db/node.xsp?id=EAD%2FGBR%2F0014%2FMTNR%20AS | publisher = "Janus" | accessdate = 2008-01-08 ] was one of the first Jewish lawyers in Austria. She was born on 7 November 1878 . She also shortened her name from Elise to Lise. It is not known why she did so. [Cornwell, "Hitler's Scientists", 66.] [ [http://www.atomicarchive.com/Bios/Meitner.shtml Lise Meitner | Biography | atomicarchive.com ] ] The birth register of Vienna's Jewish community lists Meitner as being born on 17 November 1878 but all other documents list it as 7 November, which is what she used. [Ruth Lewin Sime, Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics (University of California Press, 1996), 1.] Meitner was the second woman to earn a doctoral degree in physics at the University of Vienna.

cientific career

In 1917, she and chemist Otto Hahn discovered the first long-lived isotope of the element protactinium. That year, Meitner was given her own physics section at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry. In 1923, she discovered the cause, known as the Auger effect, of the emission from surfaces of electrons with 'signature' energies. The effect is named for Pierre Victor Auger, a French scientist who independently discovered the effect in 1925.

In 1930, Meitner taught a seminar on nuclear physics and chemistry with Leó Szilárd.With the discovery of the neutron in the early 1930s, speculation arose in the scientific community that it might be possible to create elements heavier than uranium (atomic number 92) in the laboratory. A scientific race began between Ernest Rutherford in Britain, Irene Joliot-Curie in France, Enrico Fermi in Italy, and the Meitner-Hahn team in Berlin. At the time, all concerned believed that this was abstract research for the probable honor of a Nobel prize. None suspected that this research would culminate in nuclear weapons.

When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, Meitner was acting director of the Institute for Chemistry. Although she was protected by her Austrian citizenship, all other Jewish scientists, including her nephew Otto Frisch, Fritz Haber, Leó Szilárd and many other eminent figures, were dismissed or forced to resign from their posts – most of them emigrating. Her response was to say nothing and bury herself in her work. In 1946 she acknowledged that "It was not only stupid but also very wrong that I did not leave at once." [Cornwell, "Hitler's Scientists", 207-13] 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 had 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 had inherited from his mother: this was to be used to bribe the frontier guards if required. It was not 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 did not 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. [Cornwell, "Hitler's Scientists", 214-15]

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,Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986), Simon&Shuster, NY, NY pp.257–60] 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 had 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 had detected the element barium after bombarding uranium with neutrons; [ O. Hahn and F. Strassmann "Über den Nachweis und das Verhalten der bei der Bestrahlung des Urans mittels Neutronen entstehenden Erdalkalimetalle" ("On the detection and characteristics of the alkaline earth metals formed by irradiation of uranium with neutrons"), "Naturwissenschaften" Volume 27, Number 1, 11-15 (1939). The authors were identified as being at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Chemie, Berlin-Dahlem. Received 22 December 1938.] simultaneously, they had communicated their results to Meitner in a letter. Meitner, and her nephew Otto Robert Frisch, correctly interpreted their results as being nuclear fission. [Lise Meitner and O. R. Frisch "Disintegration of Uranium by Neutrons: a New Type of Nuclear Reaction", "Nature", Volume 143, Number 3615, 239-240 [http://www.nature.com/physics/looking-back/meitner/index.html (11 February 1939)] . The paper is dated 16 January 1939. Meitner is identified as being at the Physical Institute, Academy of Sciences, Stockholm. Frisch is identified as being at the Institute of Theoretical Physics, University of Copenhagen. ] Frisch confirmed this experimentally on 13 January 1939. [ O. R. Frisch "Physical Evidence for the Division of Heavy Nuclei under Neutron Bombardment", "Nature", Volume 143, Number 3616, 276-276 [http://dbhs.wvusd.k12.ca.us/webdocs/Chem-History/Frisch-Fission-1939.html (18 February 1939)] . The paper is dated 17 January 1939. [The experiment for this letter to the editor was conducted on 13 January 1939; see Richard Rhodes "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" 263 and 268 (Simon and Schuster, 1986).] ]

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, Leó Szilárd, 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!" [Ruth Lewin Sime, "Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics" (University of California Press, 1996), 305]

Einstein himself respected Meitner and called her "our Marie Curie."

Awards and honours

In 1944, Hahn received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for the discovery of nuclear fission. Some historians who have documented the history of the discovery of nuclear fission believe Meitner should have been awarded the Nobel Prize with Hahn. [ Ruth Lewin Sime "From Exceptional Prominence to Prominent Exception: Lise Meitner at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry" [http://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/KWG/Ergebnisse/Ergebnisse24.pdf Ergebnisse 24] Forschungsprogramm "Geschichte der Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft im Nationalsozialismus" (2005).] [ Ruth Lewin Sime "Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics" (University of California, 1997).] [ Elisabeth Crawford, Ruth Lewin Sime, and Mark Walker "A Nobel Tale of Postwar Injustice", "Physics Today" Volume 50, Issue 9, 26-32 (1997).] 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.cite web | title = From the natural transmutations of uranium to its artificial fission. Nobel Lecture. | author = Hahn, Otto | date = 1946-12-13 | url = http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1944/hahn-lecture.pdf#search='meitner' | publisher = "Nobel Foundation" | accessdate = 2007-09-24 ] cite web | title = Otto Hahn – Entdecker der Kernspaltung. (de) | author = Hardy, Anne | date = 2004-03-04 | url = http://www.pro-physik.de/Phy/leadArticle.do?laid=4049 | publisher = "Pry Physik", Wiley Interscience GmbH | accessdate = 2007-09-24 ]

Later years

After the war, Meitner, while acknowledging her own moral failing in staying in Germany from 1933 to 1938, was bitterly critical of Hahn and other German scientists who had collaborated with the Nazis and done nothing to protest against the crimes of Hitler's regime. Referring to the leading German scientist Werner Heisenberg, she said: "Heisenberg and many millions with him should be forced to see these camps and the martyred people." She wrote to Hahn: :"You all worked for Nazi Germany. And you tried to offer only a passive resistance. Certainly, to buy off your conscience you helped here and there a persecuted person, but millions of innocent human beings were allowed to be murdered without any kind of protest being uttered ... [it is said that] first you betrayed your friends, then 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 did not once arm yourselves against the senseless destruction of Germany." [Cornwell, "Hitler's Scientists", 411]

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

Further reading

*
*
*
* Sime, Ruth Lewin (2006) "Lise Meitner" in [http://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521821971 "OUT OF THE SHADOWS: Contributions of 20th Century Women to Physics"] , Nina Byers and Gary Williams, ed., Cambridge University Press.
*
*Sime, Ruth Lewin "From Exceptional Prominence to Prominent Exception: Lise Meitner at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry" [http://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/KWG/Ergebnisse/Ergebnisse24.pdf Ergebnisse 24] Forschungsprogramm "Geschichte der Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft im Nationalsozialismus" (2005).
*

ee also

*List of Austrian scientists
*Meitnerium
*Hans-Hermann Hupfeld

References

External links

* "Lise Meitner" in [http://cwp.library.ucla.edu/Phase2/Meitner,[e-mail] CWP at UCLA]
* [http://physicsweb.org/articles/review/13/3/1 A critical review of Patricia Rife's book from PhysicsWeb]
* [http://www.users.bigpond.com/Sinclair/fission/LiseMeitner.html Lise Meitner Online]
* [http://alsos.wlu.edu/qsearch.aspx?browse=people/Meitner,+Lise Annotated bibliography for Lise Meitner from the Alsos Digital Library for Nuclear Issues]

Persondata
NAME=Meitner, Lise
ALTERNATIVE NAMES=
SHORT DESCRIPTION=Physicist; Scientist
DATE OF BIRTH= birth date|1878|1|17|mf=y
PLACE OF BIRTH=Vienna, Austria
DATE OF DEATH=death date|1968|10|27|mf=y
PLACE OF DEATH=Cambridge, United Kingdom