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Austrian Woman Physicist Lise Meitner (1878–1968) and the Discovery of Nuclear Fission Print E-mail
bridges vol. 19, October 2008 / Feature Article

By Patricia Rife


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lise_meitner_fullportrait_1906_small.jpg
Dr. Lise Meitner (1878 - 1968).
The dramatic splitting of the atom - nuclear fission - was a discovery that changed our world. Yet few know that it was a woman physicist, the Austrian Lise Meitner, who discovered the power of nuclear energy soon after her dramatic escape from Nazi Germany. 

Ironically, Meitner's research partner of thirty years, Otto Hahn, was the sole recipient of the 1944 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for the discovery of fission - a "discovery" that Meitner had already interpreted in 1938, shortly after her forced emigration from Nazi Germany. Meitner's exclusion from sharing the Nobel Prize was thus integrally related to her 1938 escape from Nazi Germany, and to the consequent social "marginalization" of her physics research and theoretical insights.

Such racial and gender prejudice were, and still are, dramatic backdrops to our modern era. Eleanor Roosevelt aptly stated in an 1945 NBC Radio interview that "we are proud of your contributions as a woman in science" and that helped Meitner heal part of her deep pain in the rejection and escape from Nazi Germany.  The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics, which she and Otto Hahn had administered since World War I, was the backdrop for 35 years of her pioneering research in radio-physics and radioactive processes.  Yet many were shocked that at the end of World War II, it was Otto Hahn who was alone awarded the Nobel Prize (in Chemistry) for his "discovery" of nuclear fission, when it was Lise Meitner who, in 1938,  interpreted the process of uranium splitting in two - and releasing a tremendous amount of energy in the process.   

How these circumstances came about, and how they fit into the evolution of Meitner's social conscience and her abhorrence of war, are some of the subjects discussed in the book by Patricia Rife, Lise Meitner and the Dawn of the Nuclear Age (Boston: Birkhauser 1999). The following article is an abridged account of Lise Meitner's life and scientific journey based on the book, which can be ordered at  www.Birkhauser.com .

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