Who Was Lise Meitner?

When the words "woman" and "scientist" are juxtaposed, most people think of one name only: that of Marie Curie, who won the Nobel prize for her work with radium in the early part of the 20th century. Another woman scientist who ought to have won a Nobel prize is Lise Meitner, the discoverer of nuclear fission.

Lise Meitner portrait Lise Meitner was born in Vienna in 1878. In 1907, she moved to Berlin to study nuclear physics. Women were not accepted as professors there, so Meitner obtained a junior position at a science institute. There she met Otto Hahn, a chemist who was her contemporary; they would be colleagues and friends for the next thirty years.

In 1918, after five years of research, Meitner discovered Protactinium. She became one of the most important experimental scientists in physics; Albert Einstein referred to her as "our Marie Curie."

During the 1930's, Hitler's rise to power made life difficult for Jewish scientists in Germany. Though Meitner herself was protestant, her family was Jewish, so her position in Berlin was becoming tenuous. By 1933, Jewish scientists were leaving Nazi Germany— among them Max Born, Albert Einstein, and Erwin Schrödinger.

For five more years, Meitner remained in Berlin, where she continued her research at Otto Hahn's institute. She and Hahn were struggling to analyze the breakdown products of the bombardment of uranium with slow neutrons. Their results did not jibe with any explanation they could devise.

In March, 1938, Germany annexed Austria, making Meitner's Austrian passport useless. Soon after, the Nazis' antagonism increased: Her presence at the institute would no longer be tolerated. She would have to leave Germany, but with no passport, she could not get a travel visa. In July, Meitner learned that the borders would be sealed within a few days— she had to get out immediately.

Meitner had been in contact with a few scientists in Denmark and Holland, among them Dirk Coster, the co-discoverer of hafnium. Now Coster came to Berlin and literally smuggled Meitner out of the country. The German police had been tipped off; one day later would have been too late.

The one thing that had kept Meitner in Berlin all those years had been her ability to continue doing research; only the loss of her position had finally driven her out. Eventually, Meitner obtained a position at an institute in Stockholm, but her scientific career was at a standstill.

That December, Meitner spent the Christmas holidays with friends and with her nephew, Otto Frisch, who was also a physicist. He found Meitner poring over a letter from Hahn, reporting some results of the uranium research he and Meitner had been doing. Meitner and Frisch went for a walk in the snow and talked about the experiments. They came up with a new interpretation, whereupon they sat down on a tree trunk and started calculating the nuclear parameters. The numbers came together in the way they do only when you have found the answer: the uranium nucleus had split in two.

That winter of 1938-1939, Meitner experienced the kind of joy that is granted to very few: the joy of knowing that you have made a major discovery. Despite her later disappointments, that knowledge could never be tarnished or diminished.

While Hahn was writing a scientific paper describing the breakthrough— and marginalizing Meitner's rôle— Meitner and Frisch wrote a letter to a scientific journal describing the process and calling it nuclear fission. The letter was published in February, 1939.

Once the news was out, other scientists rushed to confirm and extend Meitner's findings. When the United States began to work on an atomic bomb, Meitner was asked to take part in the bomb project. She refused.

In 1946, Otto Hahn was awarded the Nobel Prize; Lise Meitner was ignored.

When I was a student in the 1950's, I read that Meitner was "Hahn's assistant." I remember wondering how someone in such a minor position could have made such a profound discovery. Thanks to two recent biographies*, Lise Meitner has now taken her rightful place in the annals of physics.

(^) Go to top of page.

[X] Close.

*Lise Meitner: a life in physics, by Ruth Lewin Sime.
University of California Press, 1996.

*Lise Meitner and the dawn of the nuclear age, by Patricia Rife.
Birkhäuser, 1999.

Last updated on 12/28/2011