Lise Meitner solved the problem of nuclear fission—and although she never got the Nobel, she is the only woman outside of mythology to have an element named after her alone. WomensHistoryMonth
Just before Christmas 1938, sitting on a tree trunk in the snowy Swedish woods, the Austrian physicist Lise Meitner and her favorite nephew, Otto Frisch—also a physicist—made a series of calculations on scraps of paper. They did so at the request of colleagues in Germany, who were faced with a mystery. Experiments appeared to show that uranium atoms split into lighter elements upon being bombarded with neutrons, rather than turning into heavier ones, as everyone expected.
After some initial work on radioactivity, in 1907, she decided to go to Berlin to work with Max Planck. Once in Berlin, Meitner was obliged to ask Planck’s permission to attend lectures. Although hesitant , Planck did agree. However, Meitner was interested in doing scientific research as well and began a collaboration with Otto Hahn. It was a perfect match, with Hahn as the experimental chemist and Meitner as the theoretical physicist.
In 1917, she was finally given her own physics section and a salary almost equivalent to Hahn’s. Around that same time, Meitner and Hahn discovered the isotope protactinium, which won Meitner the Leibniz Medal. In 1926, Meitner became the first woman in Germany to be made a full professor. Back in Berlin, Hahn and his assistant Fritz Strassmann continued their experiments. From Strassmann’s own words, it’s clear that Meitner continued to be the guiding force of the project, “Fortunately, L. Meitner’s opinion and judgment carried so much weight with us in Berlin that we immediately undertook the necessary control experiments.” Their experiments seemed to show an amazing discovery: uranium splits into lighter elements upon being bombarded with neutrons.
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