Science · Physics

Lise Meitner

1878–1968 · Austrian-Swedish

Nuclear physics; radioactivity

Lise Meitner was a Vienna-born physicist who worked for some thirty years in Berlin with the chemist Otto Hahn. Forced to flee Nazi Germany in 1938, she and her nephew Otto Frisch gave the first physical explanation of nuclear fission early in 1939. Hahn alone received the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery, an omission now widely seen as an injustice, but element 109, meitnerium, is named in her honour.

How to spot them

▸Long partnership with Otto Hahn in Berlin; co-discovered protactinium
▸Explained nuclear fission with her nephew Otto Frisch while in exile in Sweden, 1938–39
▸Famously left out of Hahn's 1944 Nobel Prize; honoured by the element meitnerium (109)
▸Buried at Bramley, Hampshire; epitaph 'A physicist who never lost her humanity'

Key discoveries & works

Co-discovery of protactinium-231 (1917–18)

Found with Otto Hahn at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin

First physical explanation of nuclear fission (with Otto Frisch) (1939)

Published in Nature; used Bohr's liquid-drop model and E = mc² to account for the energy released when uranium splits

Radiationless electron emission later called the Auger effect (1922)

She described the effect before Pierre Auger, hence the name Auger–Meitner effect

Physics professor who refused to work on the Manhattan Project (1940s)

Declined an invitation to join the Allied bomb effort, saying she would have nothing to do with a bomb

Key ideas

Fission: a uranium nucleus struck by a neutron can elongate and split into two lighter nuclei, releasing about 200 MeV
Her exclusion from the 1944 Nobel Prize is a classic case study of women and émigrés overlooked in science

Quick-fire facts

•Born in Vienna in 1878; one of the first women to earn a physics doctorate at the University of Vienna (1906)
•Moved to Berlin in 1907 and attended Max Planck's lectures; became the first woman professor of physics in Germany (1926)
•Of Jewish descent, she escaped Germany in July 1938 and settled in Stockholm; she took Swedish citizenship in 1949
•Worked out fission with Otto Frisch over Christmas 1938 on a walk in the snow at Kungälv, Sweden; Frisch coined the term 'fission'
•Shared the US Enrico Fermi Award in 1966 with Hahn and Fritz Strassmann
•Element 109, meitnerium (Mt), is named after her
•Died in Cambridge, England, in 1968 and is buried at Bramley in Hampshire

Drill it — 7 cards

1 / 7new card

Sources

Atomic Heritage Foundation / National Museum of Nuclear Science & History — Lise Meitner
Ruth Lewin Sime — Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics