Lise Meitner
by Paul A. Schons

originally published by the Germanic-American Institute in November, 2001

Meitnerium, the artificial radioacitve chemical element No. 109, is named for Lise Meitner, the Austrian physicist who was born in Vienna on November 7, 1878. She is sometimes called the “mother of the atom bomb”, for it was she who participated in the discovery and named the process of nuculear fission. Albert Einstien called her “the German Madam Curie”, for she worked at the same time in a similar field as the French woman scientist, Marie Curie (1867-1934) who discovered radium.

Meitner’s route to a career in physics was no easy one. It was rare that women at that time in history worked in physics. Indeed, it was rare that women attended college. Education for girls in Vienna at the turn of the century focused largely on the arts and homemaking skills and ended at age 14. Young women were not accepted into the high schools which prepared young men for study at the universities. Thus, when Lisa developed a driving interest in mathematics and science, her family had to arrange for private tutoring to allow her to gain the knowledge taught in the high schools and to prepare her to take the admissions examinations to enter the University of Vienna. With intense work she was able to pass the examinations and entered the University of Vienna in 1901.

Meitner was fortunate in finding as her mentor the great theoretical physicist, Ludwig Boltzmann, who was of such a mentality that he had no problem in fully accepting a young woman who wished to learn physics. Under his guidance she began her work in the mysterious new field of radioactive materials. She completed her doctoral degree in physics in 1906. Her doctoral dissertation treated the conduction of heat in inhomogeneous solids.

Having completed the degree Meitner would leave Austria for Berlin. Germany provided a great deal more support for scientific research and opportunities there were vastly superior. In Berlin she continued her studies with the great physicist, Max Planck. She met the chemist, Otto Hahn at that time and entered into a collaboration with him, which would continue for 30 years. During World War I she interrupted her work to serve on the front lines for the Austrian army as an x-ray nurse-technician. (Marie Curie engaged in similar work on the French side during the war.)

In 1917 Meitner was able to continue her work with Hahn at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institute in Berlin. In 1918 Meitner and Hahn discovered the element, protactinium. In 1922 she became the first woman in Germany to receive certification as a university professor in physics (Habilitation). She was appointed in 1926, but in 1933 when the Nazi party came to power, due to her Jewish ancestry, her certification to teach was withdrawn. Despite the political pressures Meitner was able to continue to engage in her research. In 1934 the physical chemist, Fritz Straßmann entered into work with Meitner and Hahn.

She was partly protected from the racial pressures from the Nazis by her influential colleagues, Planck, Hahn and Straßmann, partly by being non-political and a quiet, private person and partly by the fact that she had retained Austrian citizenship. But in 1938 with the annexation of Austria she was directly affected by the Nürnberg Race Laws. She now fled to Holland with falsified travel documents and from there made her way to Sweden where she would continue her work at the Nobel Institute for Physics.

Through secret channels Hahn and Straßmann continued contact with her. In December of 1938 the work the three scientists had done earlier led the two Berlin scientists to the discovery of the splitting of the Uranium atom. They were not sure, however, of many of the details nor the full implications of the process. Meitner, working in exile in Scandinavia with her nephew Otto Frisch, worked out the first theoretical clarification of the process and published the work in 1939. They based their work on Niels Bohr’s “liquid drop” model and named the process “fission”.

Realizing the weapons potential for the splitting of the atom, Meitner got word to Einstein, who was living in America. Einstein, in turn, warned Roosevelt and the Manhattan Project was launched pitting America against Germany in a race to develop the first atomic bomb. Attempts were made to recruit Lise Meitner to come to America to work on the Manhattan Project. Meitner, a committed pacifist, refused to do so.

In 1944 Otto Hahn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery of nuclear fission. Meitner was excluded from the prize, probably partly because she was a woman (and thus in those times less visible), partly because she was living in exile and partly because she was a very quiet unassuming person. Hahn, who did win the prize, did not learn of it until after the war. Years later, in 1966, Meitner and Straßmann were credited with their role in the discovery of nuclear fission as they, along with Hahn, were named joint recipients of the Enrico Fermi Prize for their work.

After the war Meitner continued to live in Sweden and continued her researches at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. After her retirement in 1960 she moved to England. She died in Cambridge on October 27, 1968.