Lise Meitner, the mother of Nuclear Energy

Lise Meitner was a pioneering woman in physics, who as a physicist never lost her humanity. She led the team that first discovered nuclear fission but was excluded from the Nobel Prize for this discovery. Albert Einstein called the respected Lise Meitner “our Madame Curie.” About 77 years Ago on February 11th, 1939, for the first time in history, Lise Meitner described Nuclear Fission, the splitting of a Uranium atom into two lighter elements, Barium and Krypton.

Lise Meitner was born on November 7, 1878, in Vienna in a Jewish family, and at age 23, she was the first woman admitted to the University of Vienna in the field of physics and in 1906 earned her Ph.D. In 1907, Max Planck, the father of the Quantum Theory, invited Lise Meitner to Berlin for her post-doctoral study and research. This was a turning point in Meitner’s life. She led several courses in quantum physics with her outstanding graduate students such as Leo Szilard as her fellow assistant. During the period of 1924 to 1934, sub-nuclear physics and chemistry overlapped at the level where investigations of the fundamental particles of matter were conducted. At this period, Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner, and Fritz Strassmann cooperated to coordinate their investigations in both physics and chemistry. This collective work continued until 1933 when Adolf Hitler’s racist decrees stripped Jewish academics of their professional positions. During the period of 1924 to 1934, the Hahn-Meitner team were internationally well-known as the most renowned scientists in their field of investigation.  

Hahn was a brilliant chemist, while Meitner was a brilliant physicist and in fact, Meitner was the first physicist to realize the real implication of Einstein’s famous equation E=mc2 about converting mass into energy. Also, the 1932 discovery of the neutron by the British scientist James Chadwick gave a new fuel to their studies on radioactivity. Meitner, Hahn, and another chemist named Strassmann were deeply involved in identifying the products of neutron bombardment of Uranium and their decay patterns. Hahn-Meitner cooperation lasted for about 30 years. During this period, they had a very fruitful cooperation in studying various radioactive decay processes and discovering the element Protactinium. Because of their comprehensive work, they were nominated for the Nobel Prize for 10 consecutive years.

However, Meitner continued her work as a researcher at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry until 1938 when Adolf Hitler’s troops occupied Austria and brought Austrians under German law.

Flight from Hitler’s Reich

In 1938 Meitner had to leave Germany because the Nazis regime were making absolute restrictions for all people of Jewish ancestry. At last, on July 13, 1938, with the help of Hahn and a few other scientist friends both within and outside the Germany, Meitner managed to escape across the Germany border to Netherland. Then, she migrated to Denmark, where she stayed with her friend Niels Bohr. Meitner finally found a permanent home at the Nobel Institute for Physics in Sweden, while continued to exchanging daily research notes with her research partner Otto Hahn, who remained in Germany.

Her nephew, the physicist Otto Frisch, was also located at Niels Bohr’s institute in Copenhagen. At the same time, Hahn and Strassmann discovered that they had unexpectedly produced Barium, a much lighter element than Uranium, They reported their discovery to Meitner. Following detailed calculations about this process, Meitner and Otto Frisch confirmed that the process of nuclear fission had occurred during neutron bombardment of Uranium nuclei. News of the splitting of the Uranium and its gigantic release of energy was immediately announced by Bohr to physics scientists in the U.S. This was finally resulted in the Manhattan Project for the invention of Atomic Bomb.

Refusal of joining to the Manhattan Project 

Hahn, Meitner, and Strassmann were not engaged in Atomic Bomb research during World War II, although Meitner was asked to join the Manhattan Project in 1943, she replied, “I will have nothing to do with a bomb!”, but she continued to do nuclear research in Sweden and then in England. She carried on with her research and helped produce one of the first peacetime nuclear reactors. Although, Meitner was not quite famous enough for U.S. President Truman in 1946 to quip, “So, you’re the little lady who got us into all of this!”  Although Meitner was excluded from the Nobel Prize for the discovery of fission, but instead of the Nobel Prize, she was honored with an even more enduring legacy: in 1997, Element 109 in the periodic table with a half-life time of 8 seconds was named “Meitnerium” (Mt) as a tribute to her work.  Meitner also received many other awards including the Max Planck Medal and the Enrico Fermi Award in 1966 which was awarded to her just before she died. In its meeting in March 2015, the American Physical Society recognized Lise Meitner as part of a broader social media outreach effort. Lise Meitner was chosen by the popular vote on the @APSphysics twitter account and joined earlier selected physicists Nikola Tesla and Richard Feynman.

 Meitner’s Life and some of her worthy remarks

Meitner never married and as far as her personal papers indicate, she never had a serious romance. She did not write any autobiography, nor did she authorize a biography during her lifetime. Only in rare cases, she did speak of her struggle for education. Yet, her life was a full of deep human connection. She was exceptionally devoted to her friends and surrounded herself with people she cherished.

The fission apparatus, the very instrument that she used in her Berlin laboratory for making her discoveries, was on a display at Germany’s premiere science museum for thirty-five years without mentioning her name.

The experimental apparatus used to discover nuclear fission on display in the Deutsches Museum in Munich.

During her 60 years of activities in the field of nuclear physics, she wrote about 130 articles and served on the UN Committee on atomic energy. So it is not a grandiose speech to say that Lise Meitner was probably the best scientist all over the world.

In a speech in Vienna at the age of 75, Meitner articulated her sentiment by saying that “Science makes Lpeople reach selflessly for truth and objectivity; it teaches people to accept reality, with wonder and admiration, not to mention the deep joy and awe that the natural order of things brings to the true scientist.” In 1915, she has told "I love physics with all my heart ... It is a kind of personal love, as one has for a person to whom one is grateful for many things."

On October 27 1968, Lise Meitner died peacefully in her sleep, in Cambridge, England, days before her ninetieth birthday. On her headstone, it has been written: Lise Meitner: “a physicist who never lost her humanity”.