Lise Meitner

By: Anna, Whitney & Stephen

1878 - 1968

Lise Meitner’s Biography

Born November 7, 1878 in Vienna, AustriaJewish familyStudied physics at the University of Vienna

Didn’t start until age 23 because of female education restrictions

First woman admitted to the University’s physics program

Ludwig Boltzmann, her teacher, inspired her in physics

Graduated with a doctorate in 1905

Went to Berlin to work at Berlin’s Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry Worked unpaid for many years

Women not allowed any official status Met Otto Hahn, a chemist

They collaborated for 30 years

Worked with radioactive substances

Discovered protractinium together in 1918

Began researching uranium’s possibilities together with Fritz Strassman

Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn in their laboratory

World War I

Volunteered as an x-ray nurse on the front lines Her physics background

Was glad when war ended and she could continue working in Berlin University of Berlin – salary equal to Hahn’s

Nazis revoked position in 1933

Still worked at Kaiser Wilhelm Institute

World War IIGermany conquered Austria in 1938Meitner fled to Sweden

She was Jew by birth, though not by religion

Had converted to ProtestantismHahn continued experiments without

her Fritz Strassman

In Stockholm, Sweden, she worked at Manne Siegbahn’s Institute Little support – Siegbahn was prejudiced against

women

A laboratory, but no other resources

Siegbahn more focused on building big machinery

Hahn and Meitner’s clandestine meeting Visited Meitner’s nephew, Otto Frisch, in Denmark

Led to discovering nuclear fission

Splitting of the uranium atom

Hahn and Strassman published the results in Germany Meitner not listed as coauthor

Gave the chemical explanation

Meitner published physics explanation a month later

The Nobel Prize MistakeIn 1944, the Nobel Prize was given to

Otto Hahn His discovery of fission

Meitner was ignored After leaving Germany (because of the war), her

efforts were downplayed

Enrico Fermi Award

Awarded to Meitner, Hahn and Strassman in 1966

Partially rectified the Nobel Prize Mistake

Celebrated as “The Mother of the Atomic Bomb”

Contributed in nuclear fission experiments

Had no direct role in creating bombsHad a pacifist viewHorrified at the brutality bombs

inflicted

Retired to Cambridge, England in 1960Died October 27, 1968

After passing away in October 1968, her nephew Otto Frisch composed the inscription on her headstone. It reads "Lise Meitner: a physicist who never lost her humanity"

Accomplishments

Inspired by her teacher, physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, Meitner studied physics and became the second woman to obtain a doctoral degree in physics at the University of Vienna in 1905 Women were not allowed to attend

institutions of higher education in those days, but thanks to support from her parents, she was able to obtain private higher education, which she completed in 1901

Following her doctoral degree, she rejected an offer to work in a gas lamp factory

Encouraged by her father and backed by his financial support, she went to Berlin

Max Planck allowed her to attend his lectures, an unusual gesture by Planck, who until then had rejected any women wanting to attend his lectures After one year, she became Planck's

assistant

During the first years she works as Planck’s assistant, she worked together with chemist Otto Hahn and discovered with him several new isotopes In 1909 she presented two papers on beta-

radiation

In 1912 the research group Hahn-Meitner moved to the newly founded Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institute (KWI) in Berlin Worked without salary as a "guest" in

Hahn's department of Radiochemistry

It was not until 1913, at age 35 that she got a permanent position at KWI

The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Chemistry

1914-1916,the first part of World War I, she served as a nurse handling X-ray equipment She returned to Berlin and her research in

1916

In 1917, she and Hahn discovered the first long-lived isotope of the element protactinium, for which she was awarded the Leibniz Medal by the Berlin Academy of Sciences

That year, Meitner was given her own physics section at the KWI for Chemistry

In 1922, 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 1923

In 1926, Meitner became the first woman in Germany to assume a post of full professor in physics, at the University of Berlin

There she undertook the research program in nuclear physics which eventually led to her co-discovery of nuclear fission in 1939, after she had left Berlin She was praised by Albert Einstein as the

"German Marie Curie"

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

With that knowledge, a scientific race began between Ernest Rutherford in Britain, Irène 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

Meitner was acting director of the Institute for Chemistry when Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933

After Meitner was lucky to escape, she went 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 There she established a working

relationship with Niels Bohr, who travelled regularly between Copenhagen and Stockholm and with that she continued to correspond with Hahn and other German scientists

In Sweden, Meitner was first active at Siegbahn's Nobel Institute for Physics, and at the Swedish Defence Research Establishment and the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, where she had a laboratory and participated in research on R1 R1 was Sweden's first nuclear reactor

While working on Nuclear Fission Meitner first realized that Einstein's famous equation, E = mc2 explained the source of the tremendous releases of energy in nuclear fission

While it was politically impossible for exiled Meitner to publish jointly with Hahn in 1939, Hahn and Strassman had sent the manuscript of their paper to Naturwissenschaften in December 1938, reporting they had detected the element barium after bombarding uranium with neutrons; simultaneously

Meitner, and her nephew, Otto Frisch, correctly interpreted their results as being nuclear fission and published their paper in Nature Meitner’s nephew Frisch confirmed this

experimentally on January 13th, 1939

While Meitner recognized the possibility for a chain reaction of enormous explosive potential, she refused an offer to work on the project at Los Alamos, declaring "I will have nothing to do with a bomb!“

Meitner said that Hiroshima had come as a surprise to her, and that she was "sorry that the bomb had to be invented"

On November 15th, 1945 the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that Hahn had been awarded the 1944 Nobel Prize in 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

On a visit to the USA in 1946, she received the honor of "Woman of the Year" by the National Press Club and had dinner with President Harry Truman and others at the National Women's Press Club She lectured at Princeton, Harvard and

other US universities, and was awarded a number of honorary doctorates

In 1947, a personal position was created for Meitner at the University College of Stockholm with the salary of a professor and funding from the Council for Atomic Research

In 1949, she received the Max Planck Medal of the German Physics Society Meitner was nominated to receive the

prize three times

She also became a Swedish citizen in 1949

In 1951, Meitner’s status was changed to that of a Swedish member after she was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1945

In 1960, Meitner was awarded the Wilhelm Exner Medal

In 1967, she was awarded The Austrian Decoration for Science and Art

In 1966 Hahn, Strassmann and Meitner were jointly awarded the Enrico Fermi AwardBecause of Meitner’s health, she was

not able to travel to the US to receive the award and relatives had to present it to her

In 1992, element 109, the heaviest known element in the universe, was named Meitnerium (Mt) in her honor Many consider Lise Meitner the "most

significant woman scientist of the 20th Century"

All in all, Lise Meitner received 21 scientific honors and awards for her work (including 5 honorary doctorates and membership of many academies). In 1947 she received the Award of the City of Vienna for science. She was the first female member of the scientific class of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. And in 2008, the NBC defence school of the Austrian Armed Forces established the "Lise Meitner" award

Nuclear Reactor

R1, Sweden’s first Nuclear Reactor

Nuclear Bomb

Modern Nuclear Weapon

Atomic Bomb

Works Cited

http://www.atomicarchive.com/Bios/Meitner.shtml

http://www.sdsc.edu/ScienceWomen/meitner.html

http://cwp.library.ucla.edu/articles/gold_meitn.html

http://www.45nuclearplants.com/images/Nuclear_Plant.gif

http://environment-clean-generations.blogspot.com

http://www.angelfire.com/tx/yuccaflat/images/170.jpg

http://www.scholastic.com/teacher/images/articles/s/scholasticnews_indepth_north_korea_nuclear_weapons-atomic.gif

http://undergroundbombshelter.com/images/generic-design-elements-of-a-modern-nuclear-weapon.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lise_Meitner

http://cwp.library.ucla.edu/Phase2/Meitner,_Lise@844904033.html