Lise Meitner, around 1900
(Wikimedia CC public domain image)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Meitner spent most of her scientific career in Berlin, where she served as a professor of physics and chaired the department at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. \u00a0(She had earned her doctorate in Vienna, but had also studied in Berlin \u2014 where the great Max Planck, who had never before permitted women to attend his lectures, made an exception in her case.) \u00a0However, she was ethnically Jewish and so, in the wake of the anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws issued by the German Reichstag in 1935 under Nazi rule, she eventually lost her academic position. \u00a0In 1938 \u2014 the year of the infamous Anschluss<\/em> or annexation of her native Austria \u2014 she fled to neutral Sweden, ultimately becoming a Swedish citizen.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
In Sweden, she found laboratory space at an institute in Stockholm led by the Swedish physicist\u00a0Karl Manne Georg Siegbahn, a 1924 Nobel laureate. \u00a0But she hadn\u2019t really been invited, and she was never even given keys to the building, let alone technical support, equipment, or scientific collaborators.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
From her perch in Sweden, Meitner was deeply critical of German physicists, including Werner Heisenberg and her own former colleague Otto Hahn, who remained and worked in Nazi Germany throughout the Second World War. \u00a0She drafted (but apparently did not send) a letter to Hahn that read, in part:<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
You all worked for Nazi Germany. And you tried to offer only a passive resistance. Certainly, to buy off your conscience you helped here and there a persecuted person, but millions of innocent human beings were allowed to be murdered without any kind of protest being uttered . . . [it is said that] first you betrayed your friends, then your children in that you let them stake their lives on a criminal war\u00a0\u2013 and finally that you betrayed Germany itself, because when the war was already quite hopeless, you did not once arm yourselves against the senseless destruction of Germany.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
However, she and Hahn eventually reconciled and remained lifelong friends thereafter.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Meitnerium, element 109 in the Periodic Table, was named after Lise Meitner in 1997 \u2014 the only non-mythological woman to have received such an honor \u2014 at least partly by way of atonement for her having been ignored by Nobel Prize committee. \u00a0(In 1955, though, she had<\/em> won the Otto Hahn Prize! \u00a0And, in 1966, she and Hahn shared the Enrico Fermi Award with another of their collaborators, Fritz Strassmann. \u00a0In\u00a02010, long after her death, the Otto Hahn Building at the Freie Universit\u00e4t Berlin was renamed the Hahn-Meitner Building.)<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Some consider her the most significant female scientist of the twentieth century. \u00a0\u201cOur Marie Curie,\u201d Albert Einstein called her.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
In 1908, \u00a0as an adult of roughly the age of thirty, Meitner converted to Christianity \u2014 specifically, to Lutheranism. \u00a0(Two of her sisters converted to Catholicism that same year.) \u00a0In her last months, she was so frail that she was not informed of the deaths of Otto Hahn and his wife. \u00a0She died in her sleep, aged 89, on 27 October 1968 in a rest home in Cambridge, England. \u00a0(She had retired to Cambridge in 1960.) \u00a0According to her wish, she was buried at St. James parish church in the Hampshire village of Bramley. \u00a0Her nephew, the aforementioned famous Anglo-Austrian physicist Otto Frisch, composed the inscription that appears on her tombstone:<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Lise Meitner: a physicist who never lost her humanity<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0 \u00a0 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. \u00a0(Lise Meitner) \u00a0 I confess that I was unaware of her until very recently \u2014 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-72184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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![\"Hahn](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/186\/2018\/03\/Hahn_Meitner_1912-1.jpg\")
<\/a>