Lise Meitner
Science makes people reach selflessly for truth and objectivity; it teaches people to accept reality, with wonder and admiration, not to mention the deep awe and joy that the natural order of things brings to the true scientist.
LISE MEITNER
Biography.
Who is she?
Lise Meitner was an Austrian physicist nationalized in Sweden. She was born in Vienna on November 17, 1978 on a Jewish family. In 1907 he received his doctorate, the second woman to win the second doctorate in Vienna. Then she moved to Berlin where he was assistant Max Plank and measured the wavelength of gamma rays. In 1917 he was professor of physics at the University of Berlin. Lise worked actively in an investigation that lasted more than 30 years with Otto Hahn, with who she discovered the protactinium in 1918. Its merits include the research conducted in 1939, in Copenhagen along with his nephew, Otto Frisch, about transmutations of elements and especially the fission of uranium. But surely, was the discovery of nuclear fission what marked his scientific career. With the contribution of Meitner, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann produced the first example of nuclear fission. In 1939 Hahn published his results, but it was Meitner who explained the phenomenon by introducing the term of nuclear fission, in a paper published in the journal Nature. It is known for its research on atomic theory and radioactivity, however, despite pave with his discovery of obtaining point fission the way Otto Hahn, Nobel Prize in Chemistry was never recognized as co-author for being Jewish. He was also nominated for an award given five times Planck, Heisenberg, Bohr and von Laue, and after World War II, three times, for Bohr. Although he would not be granted can say that Nobel was awarded other prizes and awards medal curiously "Otto Hahn". Meitner spent the last years of his retired life in Cambridge with his nephew died 1968 when it was his 90th birthday.
Discoveries
New Isotopes and Radioactive Recoil
Soon Meitner was publishing papers in academic journals in her own name or in collaboration with Hahn, including their 1908 discovery of a new radioisotope of the element actinium.
In 1909, Meitner and Hahn discovered radioactive recoil, finding that when an atomic nucleus emits an alpha particle, the nucleus will recoil like a gun that has fired a bullet. The recoiling positively charged nucleus can be attracted to a negatively charged electrode. Meitner and Hahn demonstrated that radioactive recoil can be used to produce elements with very high purity.
Protactinium’s Long-lived Isotope
In 1917, Meitner and Hahn discovered 231-protactinium, a new isotope of the element protactinium. Until then, only very short-lived isotopes of protactinium had been discovered, making its properties hard to determine. 231-protactinium’s half-life of about 32,000 years allowed the element’s properties to be established for the first time.
Lise Meitner the forgotten scientist
Why is she not recognized today?
It was hard times for a Jewess like Lise who lived in Germany, in 1933 Hitler already ruled Germany, as Lise was Jewish was expelled from the University of Berlin and had to flee the country.
In spite of the rejection that the scientist underwent by the one that was its colleague, both continued working together in the distance. They had been trying to solve a complex problem that resisted the efforts of the best physicists of the time. This was the behavior of uranium when bombarded with neutrons. Finally in 1938 Lise and her nephew and confidant Robert Frisch get the latest results from their research. After the find, Lise wrote to Hahn commenting on the meaning of the results she had obtained in her experiment, and began to write with Frisch the article Where he explained how the atomic nuclei were divided. But at that time, Hahn had already published the discovery of the so-called nuclear Fission, without taking into account Meitner or his collaborators, which later led him to the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1944, in which he unjustly and As already mentioned before was not recognized neither she nor any of her research colleagues.
Awards
She recieved various prizes such as:
Enrico Fermi prize (1966): which was an award given by the government of the United States in honor of scientists of international prestige for their professional trajectory in the development, use, or the production of energy.
Max Plank medal (1949): Award for extraordinary contributions in theoretical Physics.
Lieben prize (1925): annual Austrian award for young scientists working in the fields of molecular biology, chemistry, or physics.
Nobel prize (1995): Meitner was an important part of the team that discovered nuclear fission, an achievement for which his colleague Otto Hahn received the Nobel Prize.
When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, Meitner was director of the Institute of Chemistry. Although protected by his Austrian nationality, all other Jewish scientists, including his nephew Otto Frisch, Fritz Haber, Lez Szilárd and many other personalities, were dismissed or forced to resign from office, their response was to say nothing And bury her own work.
In 1938, Meitner, with the help of the Dutch physicists Coster and Fokker, was lucky to escape to Holland. In Stockholm he held a post in the Manne Siegbahn laboratory, despite the difficulties caused by prejudices against women in science.
Meitner and Hahn met clandestinely in Copenhagen to plan new experiments. Meitner and Frisch were the first to articulate a theory of how the nucleus of an atom could be divided into smaller parts: uranium nuclei had separated to form barium and krypton, accompanied by the expulsion of several neutrons and a large amount Of energy.