LISA MITNER: IRONIC STORY OF THE FOUNDER OF THE “ SPLITING ATOM”

LISA MITNER: IRONIC STORY OF THE FOUNDER OF THE “ SPLITING ATOM” BY:BERNICE RICKS

EAILER YEARS • Lisa Meitner November 7 1876, she was an Austrian-born • She was born into a Jewish family as the third of eight children in Vienna. • Her father, Philipp Meitner, was one of the first Jewish lawyers in Austria.

………..Continuation • She shortened her name from Elise to Lisa. The birth register of Vienna's Jewish community lists Meitner as being born on 17 November 1878, but all other documents list it as 7 November, which is what she used. • As an adult, she converted to Christianity, following Protestantism and being baptized in 1908. • With the support of her parents, she was able to obtain private higher education

Scientific Career • Meitner studied physics and became the second woman to obtain a doctrol degree in physics at the University of Viennain 1905 • Max Planck ( a German physicist who actualized the quantum physics, initiating a revolution in natural science and philosophy )allowed her to attend his lectures, an unusual gesture by Planck, who until then had rejected any women wanting to attend his lectures. After one year, Meitner became Planck's assistant.

the BIG 3-0 • During the first years she worked together with chemist Otto Hahn and discovered with him several new isotopes. • The collaboration continued for 30 years

………Continuation • In 1917 she and Hahn discovered the first long-lived isotope of the element protactinium (is a chemical element with the symbol Pa and atomic number 91), for which she was awarded the Leibniz Medal by the Berlin Academy of Sciences. That year, she was given her own physics section at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry. • In 1922, she discovered the cause, known as the Auger effect, of the emission from surfaces of electrons with signature energies.

……….Continuation : / • She led several courses in quantum physics with her outstanding graduate students (such as Leo Szilard and Max Delbrueck) as assistants, until Adolf Hitler’s racist decrees in April, 1933 stripped Jewish academics of their professorial positions • she held her paid position at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry until the Third Reich’s invasion of Austria in 1938 brought Austrians under German law.

THE UNKNOWN PLAN • Unknown to Lisa Meitner, her escape route from Berlin was orchestrated by the international physics community and Danish physicist Niels Bohr. Her close partner Otto Hahn was not even notified of secret plans by Nobel-laureate Bohr until days before her departure in July 1938. Dirk Coster, a Dutch physicist, secretly accompanied Meitner through the stressful train journey across Nazi borders into the Netherlands. With the assistance of Bohr, she departed for Copenhagen and then Sweden.

……Continuation • she decided to cross Sweden by train to visit her 29-year-old nephew Otto Robert Frisch. Her correspondence with Hahn during December 1938 demonstrates that she continued to urge himand their assistant Fritz Strassmanin Berlinto continue researchshe had instigatedon uranium • Meitner and her nephew Frisch took a hike in the snowy Swedish woods, animatedly discussing the puzzling “bursting” process. Then they realized: if E=mc2, that mass could not be lost, but the nucleus would be “split in two.” • The insight was so dramatic that Meitner excitedly scribbled out the formulas on a scrap of paper there in the woods, urging Frisch to return to Copenhagen’s laboratories and replicate the experiments.

……Almost Done :-} • The irony of the story of Lise Meitner is that her laboratory partner of thirty years, Otto Hahn, who remained in Berlin throughout the Third Reich, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1944. Meitner’s exclusion from sharing the Nobel Prize was integrally related to her escape from Nazi Germany to Sweden and the consequent social ‘marginalization’ of her important physics research and discoveries • Albert Einstein called the respected Viennese pioneer in nuclear physics “our Madame Curie.”

LATER YEARS • After the war, Meitner, while acknowledging her own moral failing in staying in Germany from 1933 to 1938, was bitterly critical of Hahn and other German scientists who had collaborated with the Nazis and done nothing to protest against the crimes of Hitler's regime. • Meitner became a Swedish citizen in 1949. She finally decided to retire in 1960 and then moved to the UK where most of her relatives • . A strenuous trip to the United States in 1964 led to Meitner having a heart attack, which she spent several months recovering from. Her physical and mental condition weakened by atherosclerosis (is a condition in which an artery wall thickens as a result of the accumulation of fatty materials such as cholesterol)

OPPS….I THINK I BROKE MY HIP :( • After breaking her hip in a fall and suffering several small strokes in 1967, Meitner made a partial recovery, but eventually was weakened to the point where she moved into a Cambridge nursing home

"Lisa Meitner: a physicist who never lost her humanity." • She died on October 27 at the age of 89. Meitner was not informed of the deaths of Otto Hahn and his wife Edith, as her family believed it would be too much for someone as frail as her to handle.Aswas her wish, she was buried in the village of Bramley in Hampshire, at St. James parish church, close to her younger brother Walter, who had died in 1964. Her nephew Otto Robert Frischcomposedthe inscription on her headstone. It reads "Lise Meitner: a physicist who never lost her humanity."

Albert Einstein called the respected Viennese pioneer in nuclear physics “our Madame Curie.” (French chemist (born in Poland) who won two Nobel prizes; one (with her husband and Henri Becquerel) for research on radioactivity and another for her discovery of radium and polonium (1867-1934) )

Sources http://nuclearfiles.org/menu/library/biographies/bio_meitner-lise.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lise_Meitner http://www.sdsc.edu/ScienceWomen/meitner.html http://www.atomicarchive.com/Bios/Meitner.shtml http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/meitner-lise

LISA MITNER: IRONIC STORY OF THE FOUNDER OF THE “ SPLITING ATOM”