Friday, 7 November 2014

Happy birthday, Lise. Or how it's a man's world out there.

7th November. As well as being the 97th anniversary of the October revolution (yep, it happened in what the rest of the world thought of as November), this is the 136th birthday of Lise Meitner. Elise Meitner when she was born, but she later that she preferred Lise.

It probably doesn’t make a lot of sense wishing someone who’s been dead 46 years a happy birthday, but Meitner was a bit special, so why not? And I suppose we can have a happy birthday for her, can’t we?

Why was she special? To start with, she was an Austro-Hungarian Jew, not the most propitious of launchpads for an international career in science. Particularly for a woman. She set out to put that right quickly: she was the second woman to obtain a Physics PhD from the University of Vienna, and later she became the first woman to hold a chair of chemistry in any German university.

Lise Meitner at work
Working with a number of others, including in particular Otto Frisch, Meitner came up with the explanation of an observation of her fellow chemist, Otto Hahn’s. He had found that Uranium he was working on had a tendency to convert into the much lighter element Barium. He rightly concluded that some kind of fission, splitting, was happening, but it was Frisch and Meitner who came up with the theoretical explanation of the process.

They, indeed, came up with the notion of the “strong force” that holds protons together in the tiny space of an atomic nucleus, despite the massive repulsive power between them, caused by their all being positively charged.

After Hitler came to power, most Jewish scientists were driven out, but she was given a little breathing space because of her Austrian nationality, and stayed on right till 1938. It was a decision that nearly cost her dear: she only escaped to Holland thanks to Otto Hahn who talked the border guards into her letting her through.

She took up a scientific post in Sweden where she continued to work on the problem of fission. Many of her colleagues and fellow exiles from Germany, gravitated to the States, and eventually into the Manhattan project, designing the atom bomb. She refused to join, on the grounds that she had no wish to see her discovery used for the construction of a weapon.

In 1945, the Nobel Committee announced that the 1944 Chemistry prize was going to Hahn.

Yes, just Hahn.

Meitner didn’t get a look in.

“Surely Hahn fully deserved the Nobel Prize for chemistry,” Meitner commented. “There is really no doubt about it. But I believe that Otto Robert Frisch and I contributed something not insignificant to the clarification of the process of uranium fission – how it originates and that it produces so much energy and that was something very remote to Hahn.”

Yes. But she was a woman. A worse handicap, it seems, even than being Jewish in the scientific world of 1944.

Still. She won a lot of other awards and honours. Not least would have been Einstein's description of her as the “German Marie Curie.” It seems not unreasonable to add one more, however late, so: Happy Birthday, Lise.

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