Lise Meitner
Physicist
Lise Meitner
was born in Vienna, Austria November
7, 1878. She was the third child of eight children in the family. Her
father Philipp, who was a lawyer, hired tutors to teach the children,
and she received a good background in mathematics. Music was important
to the family, and all the children learned to play the piano. One of
her brothers even became a composer and concert pianist.
The Meitner children were taught to
listen to their parents, but to think for themselves.
Her formal schooling as a child ended
when she was fourteen years old,
but she still wanted to learn. She asked her father if she could study
at the University of Vienna. However, the classes there were closed to
women and Jews. She, being a woman from a Jewish family, was excluded.
Her parents insisted she first learn how to be a teacher before she
pursued a higher education. They felt she needed to have some way to
support herself financially.
Though Jewish, Meitner converted to
Protestantism when she became an adult along with some of the other
members of her family.
In 1899 the university began to admit
women even if they lacked a high
school diploma. She began to prepare for the entrance exam which was
called the Matura.
She finished an eight year study in two years. She took the exam and
passed. Fourteen women took the test and only four passed. Meitner was
one of them. She was able to enroll and attend physics classes with the men. She was 23 years
old. Five years later she had a PhD in Physics.
She
went to the University of Berlin where she, as a woman, was not allowed
to use the same lab as the men for her experiments.
While in Berlin she worked with Otto Hahn. She and
Hahn discovered a radioactive* element and named it protactinium.
She did most of the work because Otto had to serve in World War 1.
Hahn, however, received all the credit for the work. She asked him
repeatedly to give her the recognition due her, but it never happened.
In 1944 Hahn would
receive the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the interpretation of nuclear
fission. Meitner was not mentioned. Some say this was the
greatest oversight ever made by the Nobel prize committee.
She stayed in Berlin as long as she dared,
but fled the Nazis because
they were about to arrest her. After 30 years in Berlin she went to
Sweden.
Sometimes she would write scientific
articles and just sign
them "L. Meitner". The publisher thought she was a man. When he learned
"L. Meitner" was a woman, he quit publishing her articles.
She
had named the process on which she was working nuclear fission.
Without her knowledge other scientists built on her work and called it
the "Manhattan Project" which was actually the development of the
atomic bomb. She refused to help with the development of the weapon.
Meitner did not know the end result of her discovery would lead to
weapons of mass destruction. She wanted her discoveries to be used for
peaceful purposes.
To her dismay, her research resulted in the dropping of atomic bombs on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan to bring about the end of World War 2.
During her
60 years of work in the field of atomic physics she
wrote 128 articles, served on scientific commissions, and served on the
United Nations committee on atomic energy.
For many years she worked with her nephew, Otto Robert Frisch who was
34 years younger.
She and Eleanor Roosevelt in 1945 pledged to work together for world
peace.
Albert Einstein affectionately called her "our German Madame Curie".
Two years before she died she received the Enrico Fermi
Award along with her co-workers Strassman and Hahn. In 1997,
twenty-nine years after her death, the chemical element 109, the
heaviest known element was named Meitnerium
in her honor.
On her gravestone is written "A physicist who never lost her humanity".
Biography at
gardenofpraise.com