He discovered that the nucleus of a heavy atom, when assimilating an external neutron, is subdivided into other nuclei of lighter atoms. In addition to identifying this reaction, nothing less than nuclear fission, he isolated a previously unknown element, protactinium, very radioactive, located on the periodic table between thorium and uranium. Such milestones of the 20th century in nuclear matters would be enough, on their own, to go down in the history of science, but Lise Meitner also suggested the existence of the atomic chain reaction, described for the first time the pairing of electron and positron and detected several novel isotopes.
This impressive resume explains why Meitner has been called the mother of nuclear energy. Or also the atomic bomb, even though that title is unfair to her extreme pacifism. Living for more than three decades in Berlin, where he carried out his most important experiments during the interwar effervescence, Albert Einstein expressed his admiration, respect and affection for this Viennese physicist by calling her, according to biographer Ruth Lewin Sime, “our Marie Curie.” ”.
However, she was never awarded the Nobel Prize, despite being nominated for those in Physics and Chemistry almost fifty times.
Born in Vienna in 1878, Meitner belonged to a wealthy and cultured Jewish family in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. She was formed freely within it, inclined from a young age to mathematics and science, although from the age of fourteen she was forced to study teaching, as she was not allowed another academic destination due to her feminine condition.
She was already in her twenties when the laws became more flexible and she was able to enter the University of Vienna in 1901. Five years later she became the second woman to have a doctorate in Physics from that faculty, with a thesis on the transfer of temperature in non-homogeneous bodies.
The following year, in 1907, he moved to Berlin. There, her bubbly imagination, her enthusiasm, and her dedication convinced Max Planck to accept her into her classes. The influential theoretical physicist, a generation older than her, was reluctant to allow women to enter universities.
The capital of the Second Reich also put Meitner in contact with who would be his closest collaborator. Of the same age as him, affable and more open with women, the chemist Otto Hahn was also a weirdo for the majority of his colleagues. He was researching isotopes at a time when nuclear science was more of a leap of faith than an empirical discipline. Lise couldn't be happier. They would work together for three decades.
Despite the extra daily difficulties at the faculty, such as not being able to set foot in the laboratory or not being allowed to use the service, the physicist published nine academic articles with her chemist friend in two years. Some studies of this dynamic association dealt with actinium, a radioactive metal linked to uranium.
While the duo of Meitner and Hahn continued detecting isotopes and seeking to better understand their radiation, she embraced Lutheranism in 1908, the same year that Prussian universities relaxed restrictions on women. But the best was yet to come.
In 1911, the University of Berlin founded the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, which sought to unify the promotion of natural and social sciences in Germany. It would be an incomparable hotbed of talent. Academics of the stature of the aforementioned Max Planck (with whose name the institution would be renamed after the Second World War), Einstein, Fritz Haber and Meitner and Hahn themselves were among its members. The last two, at the Institute of Chemistry.
Although Lise Meitner, due to the fact that she was a woman, must have appeared in the shadow of Otto Hahn in the joint findings, she also became the first scientific assistant in Prussia. She also began to be recognized publicly. For example, she was introduced to Emperor William II, as well as to Einstein.
The First World War slowed its upward parabola. The Hahn-Meitner laboratory, the German vanguard in radioactive research, lost some of its staff. The chemist had to go to the front, and she had to serve as an X-ray technical nurse in a hospital.
However, he continued to advance in his work. To the point that, in 1917, in addition to being elevated to director of her own Physics division at Kaiser Wilhelm, she isolated a new element, the radioactive isotope protactinium-231. She shared this achievement with an absent Hahn, but who had contributed to it from afar.
That discovery launched, along with other milestones, a singularly fruitful interwar period in atomic evolution. Erected in 1922 as the first professor of Physics in Germany, Lise would recall years later that “radioactivity and nuclear physics were progressing incredibly rapidly at that time.” “There was hardly a month [in the dizzying Berlin of the Weimar Republic] in which some new and surprising discovery was not made in one of the laboratories working in this field.”
Unfortunately, this scientific flowering coincided with the incubation of the Nazi regime. Austrian citizenship and Protestantism protected nuclear physics. They shielded her, first, when Hitler took power in 1933, and, two years later, when the anti-Semitic Nuremberg laws were passed.
However, the annexation of Austria to the Third Reich in 1938 invalidated the differential nature of their nationality. The danger he faced in Germany after the Anschluss was so imminent that, when leaving the country in a hurry by train clandestinely, he took with him only some clothes and ten marks in his wallet.
An entire humanitarian network of scientists mobilized to help their colleague. The Dutch physicist Adriaan Fokker, the Danes Dirk Coster and Niels Bohr, the Swiss Paul Scherrer and, of course, Otto Hahn stood out. He gave her partner, for her subsistence, the diamond ring inherited from her mother. Coster, for his part, let the Nazi authorities believe Meitner was his wife by crossing the border shoulder to shoulder.
With that in-person, economic and bureaucratic support, physics managed to reach Sweden after passing through Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark. In Stockholm, Meitner began working in the laboratory of physicist Manne Siegbahn, although in very precarious conditions. He endured xenophobic attitudes, a ridiculous salary, inadequate equipment and the absence of helpers. They didn't even give him a key to the facilities. However, she was alive.
Likewise, he continued in contact with Otto Hahn, who replaced his daily assistance with that of Fritz Strassmann. She, assisted in turn by her nephew, the physicist Otto Frisch, exiled in London, made her greatest joint discovery with Hahn through letters, telephone calls and even a furtive meeting in Copenhagen.
The splitting of the uranium nucleus, which Lise Meitner called “nuclear fission” in 1939, nevertheless broke the long professional partnership and friendship with Hahn. The awarding of the Nobel Prize for this work in 1944 solely to the German chemist and his assistant made the separation definitive.
Despite the isolation and economic hardship she suffered in Sweden during the war, she was the only scientist who refused to participate in the Manhattan Project. The proposal, which she was offered in 1942, involved a comfortable life in the US, plus the academic respect she was not receiving in Stockholm, where she even discouraged the other members of the laboratory from speaking to her. Lise Meitner, however, spoke out loud and clear on the matter: “I will have nothing to do with a bomb!”
Paradoxically, the United States welcomed her after the war as a war heroine. She owed this celebrity to the discovery of the principle that made the atomic bomb possible, a nuclear fission that also allowed the generation of electrical energy and other non-war uses. President Truman received her with honors. Hollywood wanted to make a biopic of her, but she rejected it with Viennese irony because it seemed ridiculous.
He died in Cambridge. He had emigrated to the English city upon retirement in 1960, after adopting Swedish citizenship in 1949, to be closer to his brothers and nephews. The favorite among the latter, Otto, deservedly had the following carved on his tombstone: “Lise Meitner. 1878-1968. A physicist who never lost her humanity.”
