When Lise Meitner was a young girl she loved math, often sleeping with a math book underneath her pillow. Her father who was from Czechoslovakia and her mother who was from Russia valued education for all of their eight children, including Lise. They lived in Austria where it was easier for Jews to study, work and live. However, higher education was off limits for girls in the late nineteenth century in Europe. Their presence in university was deemed distracting. In 1897, the laws were changed allowing women to enter university provided they passed the high school exit exam. This would be difficult for most young women at this time because they would not have attended high school.
Lise and her older sister Gisela studied and passed the exam; Gisela went on to medical school while Lise went on to study physics at the University of Vienna in 1901. Most of Lise's classes where taught by Ludwig Boltzmann whose daughter was also studying physics. It was Boltzmann who believed in the existence of atoms (something controversial at the time) who presented to Lise the idea that physics was about seeking out the truth, and he urged her to go to graduate school.
Lise Meitner became the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Vienna. Because no one wanted to work with a woman, she built her own lab equipment and began studying the absorption of alpha and beta radiation in different metals. In 1907, at the age of twenty-eight, Lise published her first article on measuring the scattering of alpha particles. After meeting Max Planck, who was studying quantum physics, Lise decided to move to Berlin. The University of Berlin was intimidating to Lise because it had no women students or professors.
There, in 1907, she met Dr. Otto Hahn who was working at the Chemistry Institute. She was given a lab room in the basement and made her own equipment. Lise and Otto Hahn began working together and eventually both were given a new modern lab when the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (KWI) opened.
Lise met Albert Einstein in 1909 when they both lectured at a conference in Austria. Einstein's lectures were on relativity and how mass is a form of energy as defined by the equation E=mc2. Einstein explained later that the inside of an atom held enormous energy. He, like Lise and others believed this energy inside the nucleus of an atom could not be extracted or harnessed. In 1913, Einstein came to work at KWI and Lise was now teaching at the University of Berlin.
During World War I under the direction of Fritz Haher, Otto Hahn helped develop chemical weapons for Germany, gassing Allied troops with chlorine gas and killing thousands of men and maiming many more. Haber "weaponized chlorine" and also developed a means for Germany to make fertilizer and fertilizer-based explosives as well. For Lise, the use of science in warfare was deeply upsetting.
The post-war period in Germany was one of soaring inflation and tough times. Lise continued her research into beta and gamma radiation, studying the "decay chain of radioactive substances". She continued to publish scientific papers with Otto Hahn. Together they showed that decay could be used to date the Earth and Sun. It was an exciting time in radioactive research: the cyclotron was being developed to study particle behaviour and Lise was using a cloud chamber to map the movement of particles.
In 1920, Lise became a professor at the University of Berlin. At this time she began a close friendship with Niels Bohr and his wife Margrethe after he came to lecture in Berlin and she in Copenhagen. In 1924 Lise won the Prussian Academy of Science's Silver Liebniz Medal. In 1925 she won the Vienna Academy of Science's Ignaz Lieben Prize and in 1929 she and Otto Hahn were nominated for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. However, the 1920's saw the rise of anti-Semitism in Germany, especially against Jewish scientists like Einstein. There was a belief that there was a pure Aryan science and that the science of Jewish scientists was fraudulent.
January,1933 saw Hitler become the Chancellor of the Third Reich. It became illegal for Jews to work in government, universities and research institutions, so Einstein resigned from the KWI and the Berlin Academy of Sciences and remained in the United States. Many Jewish German scientists quit, leaving the country for Britain and the United States, but Lise Meitner was not one of them. Although she couldn't teach or attending meetings, she still had her lab.
By 1938, Lise was the only remaining Jewish scientist at KWI and she was finally asked to leave by Otto Hahn who was being threatened with the loss of government funding. Lise lost her KWI apartment and eventually found herself trapped in Germany. With the help of an entire network of scientists, Lise fled Germany, on the efforts of Dutch physicists Dirk Coster and Adriaan Fokker and her editor Paul Rosbaud, to the Netherlands. She eventually moved to Stockholm, Sweden.
In the mid-1930's, scientists were bombarding elements with neutrons and creating what were thought to be new heavier isotopes which they called transuranics. After not having collaborated with Lise for many years, Otto Hahn and his new partner Fritz Straussman sought her out to help them understand their results. In 1938, when Lise met Otto in Copenhagen, they discussed the strange results of his recent experiments. Instead of seeing new heavier transuranics, Otto was creating lighter elements. He simply did not understand what was happening on an atomic level and he needed Lise's help. In 1939, he wrote up and published a paper with his results, concluding that all transuranics research needed to be reinterpreted. But Lise, contemplating his results, soon understood that something much more important was happening - the uranium atom was being split! It was this discovery that would change the war and the course of history. Unfortunately Lise Meitner would not be acknowledged for her discovery.
Discussion
Anyone who has studied chemistry and physics in high school and university will be familiar with the names and contributions of Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, James Franck, Fritz Haber and Otto Hahn. What is almost certain, is that these same students never heard of Lise Meitner, a woman physicist and a Austrian Jew who discovered nuclear fission. The Woman Who Split the Atom tells Lise's story, her contributions to nuclear physics, her daring escape from Germany and her struggle to be recognized for her scientific contributions.
Marissa Moss has written an engaging, informative account of Lise Meitner's life and scientific contributions to nuclear physics. It is the story of a life set against the backdrop of gender and racial discrimination amid two World Wars.
Author Marissa Moss captures the determination and courage that Lise Meitner exhibited throughout her life, succeeding in spite of enormous obstacles encountered as a result of discrimination. Initially she faced many barriers simply because she was female. Women were finally allowed to attend university in 1907 but they had to pass a high school exit exam, despite the fact that girls could not attend high school Lise passed this exam. Once she graduated, Lise couldn't get hired as a physicist and lost a good job writing for an encyclopedia because she was a woman. So she had to use her initial rather than her full first name to disguise her gender.
Even though women were finally allowed onto the campus of the University of Belin in 1908, Lise found the atmosphere intimidating and hostile at the mostly male school. She was given a lab, in a basement without pay or position, and had to make her own lab equipment. Despite all of these obstacles, Lise's hard work and determination eventually saw her develop an international reputation for her research on radioactivity. She published many articles and earned the respect of many of her male scientist-peers.
When she finally achieved an academic position in Berlin, a new obstacle surfaced: her Jewish ancestry. But Meitner was reluctant to flee to safety until the last minute, because it meant giving up all that she had achieved as a woman physicist. It would mean starting all over. Because she had overcome many of the barriers due to her sex, she felt she could also overcome the barriers due to being Jewish. She was wrong.
However, an even greater challenge awaited Meitner. In 1938, Lise Meitner was able to explain Otto Hahn's unusual experimental results as the splitting of the atom, a process she called nuclear fission. Lise and Otto Hahn published a paper in 1939 describing nuclear fission and were nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1941, 1942 and 1943. In 1945, Otto Hahn was awarded the 1944 Nobel Prize for nuclear fission. He refused to acknowledge that it was Meitner who understood the atomic process that was occurring in his experiments. This lack of credit continues to this day, with the continued erasure of Lise Meitner as the scientist who explained the process of nuclear fission.
In her Author's Note, Moss writes, "By focusing on Meitner's work, as she did herself, I found the story that needed to be told: how a brilliant woman was marginalized first because of her gender, then because of her ethnicity, and ultimately by her gender again when the Nobel Prize went to a man who had no concept at all of nuclear fission, rather than to the woman who had described exactly what happened." Moss's book is an attempt to give Meitner back her place in history as the discoverer of nuclear fission.
Her erasure was foreshadowed by the events surrounding the discovery of a new isotope called protactinium in which "...Meitner did the experiments, discussed the results with Hahn, wrote up their findings, and published them." Hahn received credit for this discovery and was awarded the Emil Fischer Medal. Meitner received a copy of the medal and no recognition for her research. She would be nominated at total of FORTY-EIGHT times for the Nobel Prize. She never won.
There are forty short chapters in The Woman Who Split the Atom, each beginning with an comic illustration of an event to be highlighted in the chapter. Moss describes Lise Meitner's struggles to be accepted into the male dominated world of science, and to have her work acknowledged, something that was denied repeatedly. Moss also describes Lise Meitner's belief that science should be used for the good of mankind. This belief was severely challenged through two world wars that saw scientists develop chemical warfare in World War I and the atom bomb in World War II. In the latter war, it was Lise's discovery of nuclear fission the led to the development of the bomb. She would work towards developing atomic energy and to challenging German scientists who refused to acknowledge their complicity in the Holocaust.
The Woman Who Split the Atom is fascinating reading, drawing on the considerable research done by Marissa Moss. It is highly recommended for those interested in history and science, especially the discovery of atomic energy. Moss includes a detailed Afterword which is a sort of Epilogue demonstrating that the record regarding the discovery of nuclear fission remains incomplete and inaccurate without the acknowledgement of Lise Meitner's contribution. This thorough and detailed biography includes an Author's Note, a Timeline of Meitner's Life and Achievements, Glossary of Select Terms in Physics, Profiles of Scientists Mentioned, Notes with sources of quotes, a Select Bibliography and an Index.
Book Details:
The Woman Who Split The Atom: The Life of Lise Meitner by Marissa Moss
New York: Abrams Books for Young Readers 2022
258 pp.
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