Lise Meitner, a physicist who never lost her humanity

 

In 1963, at the age of nearly 85, Lise Meitner gave a talk in Vienna entitled “Memories of Fifty Years in Physics”. She looked back on her memories of her experiences as a scientist. She started by expressing her gratitude to the field of physics and the many wonderful characters she had been able to work with and learn from. 

Her scientific work was key to the growth of atomic physics and so many famous names were part of that world and included her professor, the theoretical physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, Max Planck and Albert Einstein who referred to her as Germany’s Marie Curie.  It is frankly surprising that she is so little mentioned or known nowadays.  She was the first woman to become a professor of physics in Germany. Her research involved the early years of radioactivity the discovery of nuclear fission and beyond. 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.

Meitner achieved so much and was one of the few women to excel in this field.  It was unusual in those days for a woman to even attend lectures at university.  Max Planck when they first met did not favour higher education for women at all. He became so impressed by her that he would make her his assistant five years later.  Another colleague, Emil Fischer, did not allow women to even enter his chemistry institute as he feared they would set fire to their hair!  Fisher would eventually appoint Meitner as head of the Physics Department of his institute. 

Lise Meitner in her talk, in 1963, looking back on her life, was grateful for all those who gave her opportunities and did not mention her struggles or that for many of those early years she worked without position or pay.  During one period as a younger scientist, she was only allowed to work in the woodshop within the Institute, which had its own external entrance and was not permitted to set foot in the rest of the building or even the laboratory space upstairs. If she needed to go to the toilet, Meitner had to use a toilet in the restaurant down the street.  None of this was mentioned by Lise Meitner in her reflections of her life in physics. Neither did she mention the even worse treatment she had to endure as a professor of physics when she was forced out of all her academic positions in the 1930s because of the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws of Nazi Germany.  Things reached such a pitch that in 1938 two Dutch friends, the physicists Dirk Coster and Adriaan Fokker helped her to flee to Sweden. 

The timing of this was unfortunate as in mid-1938, Meitner with chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute had discovered that bombarding thorium with neutrons produced different isotopes.   Meitner managed to continue her research in Stockham and in late December, Meitner and Frisch (her nephew) determined how this splitting of the atom occurred and were the first to name the process "fission" in their paper in the February issue of Nature in 1939. This principle would eventually lead to the development of the first atomic bomb during World War II, and ultimately other nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors.  However, when Meitner was asked to join Frisch on the British mission to the famous Manhattan Project at the Los Alamos Laboratory, she declared 

"I will have nothing to do with a bomb!" 

Meitner received many awards and honours late in her life but did not obtain the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for nuclear fission, which was awarded exclusively to her long-time collaborator Otto Hahn. Several scientists and journalists have called her exclusion "unjust". According to the Nobel Prize archive, she was nominated 19 times for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry between 1924 and 1948, and 29 times for Nobel Prize in Physics between 1937 and 1965. 

Max Perutz, the 1962 Nobel prizewinner in chemistry commented on Hahn’s being given the Noble prize without due recognition of Meitner’s contribution, "Having been locked up in the Nobel Committee's files these fifty years, the documents leading to this unjust award now reveal that the protracted deliberations by the Nobel jury were hampered by lack of appreciation both of the joint work that had preceded the discovery and of Meitner's written and verbal contributions after her flight from Berlin." 

It spoke volumes about how fellow scientists viewed Meitner in that they made a point of inviting her to attend the Lindau Nobel Laureate Physics Meeting in 1962.

To make amends for being overlooked for so long it was fitting that in September 1966 the United States Atomic Energy Commission jointly awarded the Enrico Fermi Prize to Hahn, Strassmann and Meitner for their discovery of fission. Unfortunately, Meitner was by that stage too ill to attend the ceremony.  She died on 27 October 1968 at the age of 89. Her nephew Frisch, with whom she had collaborated so well, composed the inscription on her headstone. It reads:

Lise Meitner: a physicist who never lost her humanity. 

“Excellence is never an accident. It is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, and intelligent execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives - choice, not chance, determines your destiny.”     

Aristotle