- Person
- Lise Meitner
- Lived
- 1878–1968
- Field
- Physics
- From
- Austrian-Swedish
The story
When the First World War broke out in the summer of 1914, Lise Meitner was an established researcher in Berlin. She and the chemist Otto Hahn had worked together for seven years and had moved in 1912 to the new Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry, where their laboratory had become known as the Hahn-Meitner Laboratory. In July 1914 Hahn was called up to the army, and many of the institute's staff would later be called up too.
Meitner decided to contribute her own expertise. Radiation was her field, and X-ray imaging had become an important tool for treating wounded soldiers, allowing doctors to locate bullets, shrapnel and broken bones. She trained as an X-ray technician and took a course in anatomy at the city hospital in Lichterfelde, near Berlin.
In July 1915 she returned to Vienna and joined the Austrian Army as an X-ray nurse-technician. Her unit was deployed to the Eastern Front in Poland, and she also served on the Italian Front. She was discharged in September 1916 after more than a year of service, at a time when few women scientists had any role in the war effort beyond the home front.
Even during the war she kept her science going. Between her training and her service she completed the study of the beta ray spectrum she had begun before the war with Hahn and Otto von Baeyer, as well as her own study of the uranium decay chain. When she returned to the institute in October 1916, she resumed research, and in January 1917 she was appointed head of her own physics section.
The war years also produced one of her most important discoveries. With Hahn and almost all the laboratory staff away at the front, she carried out the search for the parent of actinium almost single-handedly, and by December 1917 she had isolated it, leading to the naming of the element protactinium. Her wartime service and research together show both her practical commitment to helping others and her remarkable determination as a scientist.
Why it matters
Meitner applied her expertise in radiation directly to caring for wounded soldiers, using physics to help save lives at the front.
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 refused to help build the atomic bombAlthough her work explained nuclear fission, Lise Meitner declined an invitation to join the British mission to the Manhattan Project, saying she would have nothing to do with a bomb.
Sources
- Lise Meitner 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.