A Viennese childhood
Lise Meitner was born on November 7, 1878, in Vienna, the third of eight children of a cultured Jewish family. Her father, Philipp Meitner, was one of the first Jewish lawyers in Austria, a freethinker who filled the house with debate, music, and books. But the Vienna of Lise’s girlhood offered a gifted daughter a frustrating contradiction: she was visibly brilliant at mathematics and physics, yet Austrian law barred girls from the academic secondary schools that led to university, and public schooling for girls ended at fourteen. Rather than surrender her ambition, Meitner spent years in a kind of holding pattern, qualifying as a French teacher so she would at least have a profession, while privately preparing to study science. When Austria’s universities finally admitted women in 1897, she was already in her late teens, and she compressed eight missing years of schooling into barely two, studying on her own for the entrance examination she was determined to pass.
The doctorate, and Berlin
In 1901 Meitner entered the University of Vienna, where the physicist Ludwig Boltzmann became a lasting inspiration; his passionate conviction that physics was a path to truth shaped her for life. In 1905 she became only the second woman ever to earn a doctorate in physics from the university. But Vienna offered a woman scientist no real career, and in 1907 she travelled to Berlin, intending to stay only briefly to hear the lectures of Max Planck. She remained for thirty years. There she met a chemist of her own age, Otto Hahn, and the two began a partnership that would last decades. The early conditions were humiliating. The director of the chemistry institute would not permit a woman in his laboratories, and Meitner was allowed to work only in a converted carpentry workshop in the basement, entering by a separate door, forbidden the upper floors where the men worked.
Building a science of radioactivity
Meitner and Hahn made a natural team, she the physicist, he the chemist, and together they became leading investigators of the strange new science of radioactivity. They identified new radioactive species, traced the chains by which one element decays into another, and in 1917 jointly discovered the element protactinium. Slowly the barriers fell. Planck, who admired her, made her his assistant; she became the first woman in Prussia to hold the title of professor. By the 1920s Meitner directed her own physics section at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry and was a respected figure in European physics, corresponding and arguing with Einstein, Bohr, and the other architects of the quantum revolution. Einstein admiringly called her “our Marie Curie.” For a Jewish woman who two decades earlier had been confined to a basement workshop, it was an extraordinary ascent, and it was about to be violently undone.
The race for the heaviest element
In the mid-1930s, physics was gripped by a puzzle. The Italian physicist Enrico Fermi had bombarded uranium, the heaviest element then known, with neutrons and seemed to have produced new, heavier “transuranic” elements never seen before. Meitner persuaded Hahn to resume their collaboration to investigate, and the analytical chemist Fritz Strassmann joined the team. For four years the Berlin group worked to identify the strange products of irradiated uranium, convinced, like everyone else, that they were creating elements heavier than uranium itself. But the results grew steadily more confusing: the chemistry simply did not behave as it should. Meitner, the physicist of the group, was increasingly troubled, sensing that something was wrong with the entire framework of assumptions. Before she could press the puzzle to its conclusion, history intervened. The political ground beneath her had been crumbling for years, and in 1938 it gave way completely.
Flight from Germany
When Hitler took power in 1933, Meitner’s Austrian citizenship had at first shielded her from the laws stripping German Jews of their posts. That protection vanished in March 1938, when Germany annexed Austria and she became, overnight, a German citizen subject to the full weight of Nazi racial law. She was now in real danger, and forbidden to leave the country. With the quiet help of Dutch and Scandinavian colleagues, and a physicist who escorted her across the frontier, Meitner fled Germany in July 1938 with two small suitcases and ten marks in her purse, leaving behind her home, her instruments, and the work of a lifetime. She was fifty-nine years old. She found refuge in Sweden, at the Nobel Institute in Stockholm, but the welcome was cold: she was given little space, scant resources, and no assistant, and she kept contact with Hahn only by letter.
Christmas 1938
Weeks after her flight, Hahn wrote to Meitner in distress. He and Strassmann had bombarded uranium with neutrons and found, unmistakably, barium among the products, an element little more than half the weight of uranium. It made no chemical sense, and Hahn begged her for a physical explanation. Meitner read the letter while on a Christmas holiday in the Swedish village of Kungälv, where her nephew Otto Frisch, also a physicist and refugee, had come to visit. The two went walking in the snow, Meitner working the numbers on a scrap of paper. Drawing on Bohr’s picture of the nucleus as a wobbling drop of liquid, they saw it: the uranium nucleus had not chipped, it had split roughly in two. Meitner calculated the enormous energy such a split would release, and saw exactly where that energy came from: Einstein’s E=mc², the tiny lost mass converted into power. Frisch soon named the process, borrowing a word from biology, fission.
The discovery she was denied
Frisch and Meitner published their interpretation early in 1939, and the news swept through physics like a shock wave. Within months, laboratories around the world had confirmed nuclear fission, and physicists immediately grasped its terrifying corollary, that a splitting nucleus released spare neutrons, which could split further nuclei, which could sustain a chain reaction of almost unimaginable power. Meitner had supplied the central physical insight and named the field’s defining concept. Yet in 1944 the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of fission was awarded to Otto Hahn alone. Meitner’s name was absent. Decades of analysis have judged it one of the most glaring injustices in the history of the prize, the product of a poorly informed committee, of disciplinary bias between chemistry and physics, of wartime confusion, and of Hahn’s own postwar reluctance to credit his exiled Jewish colleague, whose contribution he increasingly minimised. Meitner felt the omission, and the cooling of an old friendship, as a deep personal wound.
The bomb she refused to build
As fission’s military potential became clear, the United States launched the Manhattan Project, and recruiters approached the physicists who understood the new science best. Meitner, the woman who had explained fission itself, was invited to join the effort to build the atomic bomb at Los Alamos. She refused, flatly and without hesitation. “I will have nothing to do with a bomb,” she said. She was one of very few physicists of the front rank to decline the project on conscience. When the bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, Meitner was horrified, and dismayed to find herself lionised by the American press as the “Jewish mother of the bomb” a phrase that distorted both her work and her values. She insisted, then and afterward, that scientists bore a moral responsibility for the uses of their discoveries, and that the turning of science to slaughter was a corruption of everything it was meant to be.
Vindication, and an honoured old age
Though the Nobel committee never corrected its error, the wider scientific world slowly gave Meitner her due. She continued research in Sweden into her seventies, became a Swedish citizen, and was honoured, late in life, with degrees and awards. In 1966 she shared the prestigious Enrico Fermi Award with Hahn and Strassmann, a belated official acknowledgement that fission had been the work of three. She spent her final years in Cambridge, England, near Frisch, and died there on October 27, 1968, days short of her ninetieth birthday. Frisch composed her epitaph: “A physicist who never lost her humanity.” The fullest honour came afterward. In 1997 element 109 was named meitnerium, making Lise Meitner one of the very few scientists, and the only woman so recognised who never received a Nobel Prize, to have an element named for her: a permanent place on the periodic table she had spent her life helping to extend.
Impact and legacy
Nuclear fission, the process Meitner explained and named, became one of the most consequential discoveries of the twentieth century. Its destructive face is unmistakable, but fission also gave the world nuclear power, which now generates roughly a tenth of global electricity without burning carbon, and the reactors that produce medical isotopes used every day to diagnose and treat millions of patients. Beyond the physics, Meitner left two legacies. The first was an example of integrity: a scientist who reached the summit of her field and then refused, on principle, to turn her knowledge into a weapon. The second was a life that exposed, simply by being lived, how much talent the world squanders when it shuts people out, a girl barred from school who became one of the great physicists of her age, and who did her most famous work as a penniless refugee, in exile, at fifty-nine. Generations of scientists, and especially women entering physics, have taken her as a model of brilliance, courage, and conscience.
Sources & further reading
Lise Meitner, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life 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.