105 Facts About Lise Meitner

Lise Meitner spent much of her scientific career in Berlin, where she was a physics professor and a department head at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry.

Lise Meitner was the first woman to become a full professor of physics in Germany.

Lise Meitner lost her positions in 1935 because of the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws of Nazi Germany, and the 1938 Anschluss resulted in the loss of her Austrian citizenship.

Lise Meitner lived in Stockholm for many years, ultimately becoming a Swedish citizen in 1949, but relocated to Britain in the 1950s to be with family members.

Lise Meitner did not share the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for nuclear fission, which was awarded to her long-time collaborator Otto Hahn.

Lise Meitner received many other honours, including the posthumous naming of element 109 meitnerium in 1997.

Lise Meitner's father was one of the first Jewish lawyers admitted to practice in Austria.

Lise Meitner's father was a freethinker, and she was brought up as such.

Lise Meitner was drawn to mathematics and science, and studied the colours of an oil slick, thin films, and reflected light.

Lise Meitner began taking private lessons with two other young women in 1899, cramming the missing years of secondary education into two.

Lise Meitner was particularly inspired by Ludwig Boltzmann and often spoke with enthusiasm about his lectures.

Lise Meitner's dissertation was supervised by Franz Exner and his assistant Hans Benndorf.

Lise Meitner's thesis, titled, was submitted on 20 November 1905 and approved on 28 November.

Lise Meitner passed an oral exam from Exner and Boltzmann on 19 December, and was awarded her doctorate on 1 February 1906.

Lise Meitner became the second woman to earn a doctoral degree in physics at the University of Vienna, after Olga Steindler who had received her degree in 1903; the third was Selma Freud, who worked in the same laboratory as Meitner, and received hers in 1906.

Lise Meitner's thesis was published as on 22 February 1906.

Lise Meitner was able to explain the results, and made predictions based on her explanation, which she then verified experimentally, demonstrating her ability to carry out independent and unsupervised research.

Lise Meitner published the results in her report on "Some Conclusions Derived from the Fresnel Reflection Formula".

In 1906, while engaged in this research, Lise Meitner was introduced by Stefan Meyer to radioactivity, then a very new field of study.

Lise Meitner submitted her findings to the on 29 June 1907.

Lise Meitner became friends with Planck's twin daughters Emma and Grete, who were born in 1889, and shared Meitner's love of music.

Lise Meitner added that Otto Hahn at the chemistry institute was looking for a physicist to collaborate with.

Lise Meitner had studied radioactive substances under William Ramsay and Ernest Rutherford, and was already credited with the discovery of what were then thought to be several new radioactive elements.

Lise Meitner was allowed to work in the wood shop, which had its own external entrance, but she could not enter the rest of the institute, including Hahn's laboratory space upstairs.

Lise Meitner observed that radioactive recoil, which had been discovered by Harriet Brooks in 1904, could be a new way of detecting radioactive substances.

Hahn and Lise Meitner carefully measured the absorption of beta particles by aluminium, but the results were puzzling.

In 1914, James Chadwick found that electrons emitted from the nucleus formed a continuous spectrum, but Lise Meitner found this hard to believe, as it seemed to contradict quantum physics, which held that electrons in an atom can only occupy discrete energy states.

In 1912, Hahn and Lise Meitner moved to the newly founded Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin.

Unlike the universities, the privately funded KWI had no policies excluding women, but Lise Meitner worked without pay as a "guest" in Hahn's section.

Lise Meitner may have encountered financial difficulties after the death of her father in 1910.

Lise Meitner celebrated with a dinner party at the Hotel Adlon.

In 1914, Lise Meitner was offered an academic position in Prague, which was then part of her country of Austria-Hungary.

Planck made it clear to Fischer that he did not want Lise Meitner to leave, and Fischer arranged for her salary to be doubled to 3,000 marks.

Lise Meitner undertook X-ray technician training, and a course on anatomy at the city hospital in Lichterfelde.

Lise Meitner's unit was deployed to the Eastern front in Poland, and she served on the Italian front before being discharged in September 1916.

The Hahn-Lise Meitner Laboratory was divided into separate Hahn and Lise Meitner Laboratories, and her pay was increased to 4,000 marks.

In 1914, Hahn and Lise Meitner had developed a new technique for separating the tantalum group from pitchblende, which they hoped would speed the isolation of the new isotope.

When Lise Meitner resumed this work in 1917, Hahn and most of the students, laboratory assistants and technicians had been called up to serve in the armed forces, so Lise Meitner had to do everything herself.

Lise Meitner set 1.5 grams aside and added a tantalum pentafluoride carrier to the other 0.5 grams, which she dissolved in hydrogen fluoride.

Lise Meitner then boiled it in concentrated sulfuric acid, precipitated what was believed to be element 91, and verified that it was an alpha emitter.

Lise Meitner went to Vienna, where she met with Stefan Meyer.

Lise Meitner submitted their findings for publication in March 1918.

Fajans agreed to Lise Meitner naming the element "protoactinium", and assigning it the chemical symbol Pa.

In June 1918, Soddy and John Cranston announced that they had independently extracted a sample of the isotope, but unlike Lise Meitner they were unable to describe its characteristics.

In 1921, Lise Meitner accepted an invitation from Manne Siegbahn to come to Sweden and give a series of lectures on radioactivity as a visiting professor at Lund University.

Lise Meitner found that very little research had been done on radioactivity in Sweden, but she was eager to learn about X-ray spectroscopy, which was Siegbahn's specialty.

Armed with her newly acquired knowledge of X-ray spectroscopy, Lise Meitner took a fresh look at the beta-ray spectra when she returned to Berlin.

Lise Meitner was sceptical of Chadwick's claim that the spectral lines were entirely due to secondary electrons, while the primary ones formed a continuous spectrum.

Lise Meitner discovered the cause of the emission of electrons from surfaces of atoms with "signature" energies, now known as the Auger-Lise Meitner effect, in 1922.

Lise Meitner was the first woman to receive her habilitation in physics in Prussia, and only the second in Germany after Hedwig Kohn.

Lise Meitner therefore gave an inaugural lecture on "Problems of Cosmic Physics".

In 1930, Lise Meitner taught a seminar on "Questions of Atomic Physics and Atomic Chemistry" with Leo Szilard.

Lise Meitner had a Wilson cloud chamber constructed at the KWI for Chemistry, the first one in Berlin, and with her student Kurt Freitag studied the tracks of alpha particles that did not collide with a nucleus.

Lise Meitner proved Chadwick's assertion that the discrete spectral lines were entirely the result of secondary electrons, and the continuous spectra were therefore indeed entirely caused by the primary ones.

Lise Meitner found this result so troubling that she repeated the experiment with Wilhelm Orthmann using an improved method, and verified Ellis and Wooster's results.

Lise Meitner never tried to conceal her Jewish descent, but initially was exempt from its impact on multiple grounds: she had been employed before 1914, had served in the military during the World War, was an Austrian rather than a German citizen, and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute was a government-industry partnership.

Lise Meitner declined a lucrative offer of employment because it required political training and Nazi Party membership, and resigned from the Society of German Chemists when it became part of the Nazi German Labour Front rather than become a member of a Nazi-controlled organisation.

Between 1933 and 1935, Lise Meitner published exclusively in the journal, as its editor Arnold Berliner was Jewish, and he continued to accept submissions from Jewish scientists.

At that time Lise Meitner and I decided to repeat Fermi's experiments in order to find out whether the 13-minute isotope was a protactinium isotope or not.

Hahn and Strassmann refined their chemical procedures, while Lise Meitner devised new experiments to examine the reaction processes.

In May 1937, Hahn and Lise Meitner issued parallel reports, one in with Lise Meitner as the first author, and one in with Hahn as the first author.

Lise Meitner considered the possibility that the reactions were from different isotopes of uranium; three were known: uranium-238, uranium-235 and uranium-234.

Lise Meitner asked Hans Kramers to see if anything was available in the Netherlands.

Coster spoke to the head of the border guards, who assured him that Lise Meitner would be admitted.

The next morning Lise Meitner met Coster at the railway station, where they pretended to have met by chance.

Hahn told everyone at the KWI for Chemistry that Lise Meitner had gone to Vienna to visit her relatives, and a few days later the institute had closed for the summer.

Lise Meitner tried to ship her belongings to Sweden, but the Reich Ministry of Education insisted they remain in Germany.

That day, Lise Meitner arrived in Copenhagen; arranging a travel visa had been difficult with her invalid Austrian passport.

Lise Meitner received the letter from Hahn describing his chemical proof that some of the product of the bombardment of uranium with neutrons was barium.

Lise Meitner dismissed the possibility that Hahn's identification of barium was in error; her faith in Hahn's expertise as a chemist was absolute.

Lise Meitner decided he needed a name for the newly discovered nuclear process.

Lise Meitner spoke to William A Arnold, an American biologist working with George de Hevesy, and asked him what biologists called the process by which living cells divided into two.

Lise Meitner was nominated 49 times for Physics and Chemistry Nobel Prizes but never won.

Lise Meitner was the one who told Hahn and Strassman to test their radium in more detail, and it was she who told Hahn that it was possible for the nucleus of uranium to disintegrate.

The poor relationship between Siegbahn and Lise Meitner was a factor here, as was the bias towards experimental rather than theoretical physics.

Lise Meitner did not think that their work was groundbreaking and argued that the prize for physics was given for experimental rather than theoretical work, which had not been the case for many years.

Lise Meitner's nominators included Arthur Compton, Dirk Coster, Kasimir Fajans, James Franck, Otto Hahn, Oskar Klein, Niels Bohr, Max Planck and Max Born.

On 14 January 1939, Lise Meitner learned that her brother-in-law Jutz had been released from Dachau and he and her sister Gusti were permitted to emigrate to Sweden.

Lise Meitner worked there until he was pensioned off in 1948, and then moved to Cambridge to join Otto Robert Frisch.

Lise Meitner visited Cambridge in July 1939 and accepted an offer from William Lawrence Bragg and John Cockcroft of a position at the Cavendish Laboratory on a three-year contract with Girton College, Cambridge, but the Second World War broke out in September 1939 before she could make the move.

In Sweden, Lise Meitner continued her research as best she could.

Lise Meitner measured the neutron cross sections of thorium, lead and uranium using dysprosium as a neutron detector, an assay technique pioneered by George de Hevesy and Hilde Levi.

Lise Meitner was able to arrange for Hedwig Kohn, who faced deportation to Poland, to come to Sweden, and eventually to emigrate to the United States, travelling via the Soviet Union.

Lise Meitner was unsuccessful in bringing Stefen Meyer out of Germany, but he managed to survive the war.

Lise Meitner had a radio interview with Eleanor Roosevelt, and a few days later another one with a radio station in New York, during which she heard her sister Frida's voice for the first time in years.

Lise Meitner lectured at Princeton University, Harvard University and Columbia University, and discussed physics with Albert Einstein, Hermann Weyl, Tsung-Dao Lee, Yang Chen-Ning and Isidor Isaac Rabi.

Lise Meitner went to Durham, North Carolina and saw Hertha Sponer and Hedwig Kohn, and spent an evening in Washington, DC, with James Chadwick, who was now the head of the British Mission to the Manhattan Project.

Lise Meitner met the project's director, Major General Leslie Groves.

Lise Meitner spoke at Smith College, and went to Chicago, where she met Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller, Victor Weisskopf and Leo Szilard.

In 1947, Lise Meitner moved to the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, where Gudmund Borelius established a new facility for atomic research.

At the KTH, Lise Meitner had three rooms, two assistants, and access to technicians, with Sigvard Eklund occupying the room next door.

Plans were approved for R1, Sweden's first nuclear reactor, in 1947, with Eklund as the project director, and Lise Meitner worked with him on its design and construction.

Lise Meitner retired in 1960 and moved to the UK where many of her relatives were.

Hahn wrote in his memoirs that he and Lise Meitner had remained lifelong close friends.

Lise Meitner emphasised Hahn's personal qualities, his charm and musical ability.

Lise Meitner died in her sleep on 27 October 1968 at the age of 89.

Lise Meitner was not informed of the deaths of Otto Hahn on 28 July 1968 or his wife Edith on 14 August, as her family believed it would be too much for someone so frail.

Lise Meitner was praised by Albert Einstein as the "German Marie Curie".

Lise Meitner received the Leibniz Medal from the Prussian Academy of Sciences in 1924, the Lieben Prize from the Austrian Academy of Sciences in 1925, the Ellen Richards Prize in 1928, the City of Vienna Prize for science in 1947, Max Planck Medal of the German Physical Society jointly with Hahn in 1949, the inaugural Otto Hahn Prize of the German Chemical Society in 1954, the Wilhelm Exner Medal in 1960, and in 1967, the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art.

Lise Meitner became a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1945, and a full member in 1951, permitting her to participate in the Nobel Prize process.

Lise Meitner was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1960.

Lise Meitner received honorary doctorates from Adelphi College, the University of Rochester, Rutgers University and Smith College in the United States, the Free University of Berlin in Germany, and the Stockholm University in Sweden.

Lise Meitner's diploma bore the words: "For pioneering research in the naturally occurring radioactivities and extensive experimental studies leading to the discovery of fission".

Lise Meitner is the first and so far the only non-mythological woman thus exclusively honoured.

In 2006 the "Gothenburg Lise Meitner Award" was established by the University of Gothenburg and Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden; it is awarded annually to a scientist who has made a breakthrough in physics.