107 Facts About Lise Meitner

Lise Meitner was an Austrian-Swedish physicist who was one of those responsible for the discovery of the element protactinium and nuclear fission.

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

Lise Meitner spent most of her scientific career in Berlin, Germany, where she was a physics professor and a department head at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute; she was the first woman to become a full professor of physics in Germany.

Lise Meitner lost these positions in the 1930s because of the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws of Nazi Germany, and in 1938 she fled to Sweden, where she lived for many years, ultimately becoming a Swedish citizen.

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

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

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

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

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

Lise Meitner's education included bookkeeping, arithmetic, history, geography, science, French and gymnastics.

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

Lise Meitner was particularly inspired by Boltzmann, and was said to often speak with contagious enthusiasm of his lectures.

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

Lise Meitner's thesis titled Prufung einer Formel Maxwells was submitted on 28 November 1905, evaluated by Exner and Boltzmann, and approved on 28 November 1905.

Lise Meitner became one of the first women to earn a doctoral degree in physics at the University of Vienna, after Olga Steindler who had received her degree in 1903.

Lise Meitner's thesis was published as Warmeleitung in inhomogenen Korpern on 22 February 1906.

Lise Meitner was not only able to explain what was going on; she went further and made predictions based on her explanation, and then verified them experimentally, demonstrating her ability to carry out independent and unsupervised research.

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

Lise Meitner became friends with Planck's twin daughters Emma and Grete, who shared her 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 Sir William Ramsay, and in Montreal under Rutherford, and was already credited with the discovery of what were then thought to be several new radioactive elements.

Lise Meitner completed his habilitation in the spring of 1907, and became a Privatdozent.

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

Lise Meitner observed that radioactive recoil 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 atomic nucleus formed a continuous spectrum, but Lise Meitner found this hard to believe, as it seemed to contradict quantum physics.

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

Lise Meitner worked without salary as a "guest" in Hahn's section.

Later that year, perhaps fearing that Lise Meitner was in financial difficulties and might return to Vienna, since her father had died in 1910, Planck appointed her his assistant at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in the Friedrich Wilhelm University.

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

In 1914, Lise Meitner received an attractive offer of an academic position in Prague.

Planck made it clear to Fischer that he didn't 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 for a while 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 work in 1917, though, not only Hahn but most of the students, laboratory assistants and technicians had been called up, 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 effect.

Women were granted the right of habilitation in Prussia in 1920, and in 1922 Lise Meitner was granted her habilitation and became a Privatdozentin.

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

Since Lise Meitner had already published over 40 papers, she was not required to submit a thesis, but Max von Laue recommended that the requirement for an inaugural lecture not be waived, since he was interested in what she had to say.

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 was so stunned by this result 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 Naturwissenschaften, as its editor Arnold Berliner was Jewish, and 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 shine more light on the reaction processes.

In May 1937, Hahn and Lise Meitner issued parallel reports, one in Zeitschrift fur Physik with Lise Meitner as the first author, and one in Chemische Berichte 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 train station, where they pretended to have met each other 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 vacation.

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.

The physicists, particularly Lise Meitner, told him that the results of the experiments, particularly the supposed discovery of isomers of radium, could not be correct, and the experiments would have to be re-done.

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

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

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, Oscar 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, 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 down 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 the amiable 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 most of her relatives were, although she continued working part-time and giving lectures.

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 University of Stockholm 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.

In October 2010, the building at the Free University of Berlin that had once housed the KWI for Chemistry, and was known as the Otto Hahn Building since 1956, was renamed the Hahn-Lise Meitner Building, and in July 2014 a statue of Lise Meitner was unveiled in the garden of the Humboldt University of Berlin next to similar statues of Hermann von Helmholtz and Max Planck.