Lise Meitner, Nuclear Physicist (NatGeo.jpg-wikipedia-e1790794905625.jpg)
Lise Meitner
Nuclear Physicist
Co-discovered the radioactive element protactinium
Brilliant is an understatement to describe Lise Meitner, who grew up in Vienna. She is a prime example of women being snubbed despite their spectacular achievements. She should have shared the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for nuclear fission, but the honor went to her collaborator, Otto Hahn. She was nominated 19 times for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and 30 times for the Nobel Prize in Physics but was never given the honor. She received a number of prestigious awards, but the biggest honor came too late. A research team in Germany suggested element 109 be named meitnerium, but it was given posthumously in 1997.
Meitner was interested in science as early as eight years old and kept a notebook of her scientific research under her pillow. Science and math were her interests, but because of restrictions on women’s education, she trained to be a teacher. Further, a woman couldn’t enter a public university in Vienna until 1897 and then had to pass the matura, a series of written and oral tests.
She was the first physics teacher in Germany but lost the position and citizenship because she was Jewish in Nazi Germany. She fled to Sweden in 1938 and became a Swedish citizen. Later she moved to England to be with family members. She coined the term “nuclear fission” in 1939 with her nephew, Otto Robert Frisch.
Bio
- Born – November 7, 1878 in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, although Vienna’s Jewish community registry lists November 17 as her birthday
- Third of eight children
- Parents – Father, Philipp Meitner, chess master; mother, Hedwig
- 1892 – Completed high school
- 1902 – Passed matura, the series of tests to enter university
- 1906 – Doctorate in physics, University of Vienna
- 1926 – First woman professor of physics in Germany
Career
- 1918 – Helped discover a stable form of highly radioactive element, protactinium, PA
- 1935 – Lost her position as professor because she was Jewish
- 1938 – Left Germany and settled in Sweden
- 1938 – Helped discover that uranium atoms split apart
- 1939 – Proposed the process called nuclear fission
- 1949 – Became a citizen of Sweden
- 1960 – Relocated to England to be with family members
Personal
Meitner never married and had no children.
She died October 27, 1968 in Cambridge, England at the age of 89.
Further information
105 Facts About Lise Meitner | FactSnippet
www.azquotes.com/author/24109-Lise_Meitner
www.epa.gov/radtown/women-radiation-history-lise-meitner
www.amazon.com: Lise Meitner
www.ans.org/news/article-938/lise-meitners-fantastic-explanation-nuclear-fission
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