She was in Sweden, when her colleagues were conducting experiments on nuclear fission in their Berlin lab where she too worked not too long ago. She had been forced to flee, and was actually quite lucky to make it past the German border in spite of leaving the option of fleeing for very late. Her secret correspondence with her colleagues still went on, as they wrote to her the details of their experiments and findings, and she wrote back participating in the analysis. She was actually the key member of their team when it came to analysis. And this wasn't a small thing, considering it included Strassman and Otto Hahn!
She was closer to sixty at this time, and had faced throughout her career the odds stacked steeply against her. Mostly borne of prejudices because she was a woman in Europe on the cusp of nineteenth and twentieth century, where being a woman scientist was sadly very tough. Partly also because she was a Viennese Jew working in a Berlin establishment, even though that establishment was as esteemed as the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. She wasn't even a permanent member of the staff for thirty years - so strong were the prejudices! She had a couple of things on her side though. Firstly she was tutored by the great Ludwig Boltzmann. Secondly she became friends with the brilliant, honest and objective Otto Hahn - a team that stood the test of time for more than three decades, even when she had to escape from the new bigoted government. It was a very close friendship, marred only by his not publicly sharing the credit with her when he got a Nobel and she didn't.
Fast forward to the late thirties and her long-distance research from Sweden. Hahn had written to her sharing the expected and yet astonishing results of fission of Uranium nucleus. There were plenty of unanswered questions. Why Barium. Why the puff of energy accompanying the fission. It was her who - for the first time in the world - computed that the puff of energy corresponded exactly with the difference in the masses of the original Uranium and the resultant Krypton and Barium, if one applies Einstein's equation of mass-energy conservation! She was also the first one to propose that elements larger than Uranium in atomic number would not be found in nature. Her theory of the electromagnetic repulsion of so great a number of protons exceeding the strong nuclear force that bound them together was a landmark in itself.
She got an invitation to move to the US, and be a part of Los Alamos. What would someone do in this case? Someone who was a brilliant scientist, and faced so much prejudice all her life that she didn't even have a permanent job; and when she finally had, she had to flee from the persecution of a racist government? Well, she refused! "I will have nothing to do with a bomb"!
There is a Sherlock Holmes short story of a failed case, after which Holmes instructs Watson to say just one word "Norbury" in his ears if he ever felt Holmes was getting complacent or arrogant. Well, if one ever starts judging a scientist's contribution by the awards and the accolades, or the Nobel prize, one just has to say Hubble. Or Mendeleev. Or Hoyle. Or Meitner.
Happy 135th birthday Lise Meitner.
She was closer to sixty at this time, and had faced throughout her career the odds stacked steeply against her. Mostly borne of prejudices because she was a woman in Europe on the cusp of nineteenth and twentieth century, where being a woman scientist was sadly very tough. Partly also because she was a Viennese Jew working in a Berlin establishment, even though that establishment was as esteemed as the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. She wasn't even a permanent member of the staff for thirty years - so strong were the prejudices! She had a couple of things on her side though. Firstly she was tutored by the great Ludwig Boltzmann. Secondly she became friends with the brilliant, honest and objective Otto Hahn - a team that stood the test of time for more than three decades, even when she had to escape from the new bigoted government. It was a very close friendship, marred only by his not publicly sharing the credit with her when he got a Nobel and she didn't.
Fast forward to the late thirties and her long-distance research from Sweden. Hahn had written to her sharing the expected and yet astonishing results of fission of Uranium nucleus. There were plenty of unanswered questions. Why Barium. Why the puff of energy accompanying the fission. It was her who - for the first time in the world - computed that the puff of energy corresponded exactly with the difference in the masses of the original Uranium and the resultant Krypton and Barium, if one applies Einstein's equation of mass-energy conservation! She was also the first one to propose that elements larger than Uranium in atomic number would not be found in nature. Her theory of the electromagnetic repulsion of so great a number of protons exceeding the strong nuclear force that bound them together was a landmark in itself.
She got an invitation to move to the US, and be a part of Los Alamos. What would someone do in this case? Someone who was a brilliant scientist, and faced so much prejudice all her life that she didn't even have a permanent job; and when she finally had, she had to flee from the persecution of a racist government? Well, she refused! "I will have nothing to do with a bomb"!
There is a Sherlock Holmes short story of a failed case, after which Holmes instructs Watson to say just one word "Norbury" in his ears if he ever felt Holmes was getting complacent or arrogant. Well, if one ever starts judging a scientist's contribution by the awards and the accolades, or the Nobel prize, one just has to say Hubble. Or Mendeleev. Or Hoyle. Or Meitner.
Happy 135th birthday Lise Meitner.
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