- Person
- Lise Meitner
- Lived
- 1878–1968
- Field
- Physics
- From
- Austrian-Swedish
The story
Lise Meitner had spent thirty years at the forefront of research on radioactivity in Berlin before Nazi persecution forced her to flee in July 1938. Living in exile in Sweden, she and her nephew Otto Robert Frisch worked out at the end of that year that uranium nuclei could split in two, releasing enormous energy. Their explanation, published in Nature in February 1939, had an electrifying effect on scientists everywhere.
Physicists quickly realised that the discovery could make possible a weapon of unprecedented power. In 1940 Frisch and Rudolf Peierls, working at the University of Birmingham, wrote a memorandum showing how an atomic explosion could be produced, and Britain and then the United States launched bomb projects. Frisch went on to lead experiments at Los Alamos that determined how much enriched uranium a bomb would need.
Meitner chose differently. Working in Stockholm, she received an offer to join Frisch in the British contribution to the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. She declined, declaring that she would have nothing to do with a bomb. Many of her friends and colleagues joined the project, but she kept to her own research, measuring how neutrons interact with thorium, lead and uranium, and helped persecuted colleagues where she could, including the physicist Hedwig Kohn, whom she helped bring to Sweden and then on to the United States.
After the war she said that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had come as a surprise to her and that she was sorry the bomb had to be invented. She devoted her later work to peaceful uses of the nucleus. In 1947 she moved to the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, where she worked with Sigvard Eklund on the design and construction of R1, Sweden's first nuclear reactor.
When she died in 1968, Frisch composed the inscription on her gravestone in the Hampshire village of Bramley. It describes her as a physicist who never lost her humanity. Her refusal is still cited in discussions of scientists' responsibility for how their discoveries are used.
Why it matters
Meitner's stand has become a lasting example of a scientist placing conscience above career, and she turned her expertise instead to peaceful nuclear research.
About Lise Meitner
Nuclear physicist who co-discovered nuclear fission; refused to work on the atomic bomb. Element 109 (meitnerium) named for her.
More about Lise Meitner
- Lise Meitner explained and named nuclear fissionLise Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch were the first to explain how a uranium nucleus splits, and in a 1939 paper in Nature they named the process "fission".
- Lise Meitner discovered what is now the Auger–Meitner effectIn 1922 Lise Meitner explained why atoms emit electrons with signature energies. The process is now called the Auger–Meitner effect after her and Pierre Auger.
- Lise Meitner became Germany's first woman physics professorIn 1926 Lise Meitner became the first woman university professor of physics in Germany, after starting her Berlin career as an unpaid guest in a converted woodshop.
- Lise Meitner isolated and named protactiniumWorking almost alone during the First World War, Lise Meitner isolated the long-lived isotope of element 91 by December 1917 and named the element protactinium.
- Lise Meitner served as an X-ray nurse in World War IDuring the First World War, Lise Meitner trained as an X-ray technician and served with the Austrian Army as an X-ray nurse on the Eastern and Italian fronts.
Sources
- Lise Meitner Wikipedia
- Otto Robert Frisch Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.