There is actually a momentous setting in “Oppenheimer,” the hit movie concerning the structure of the nuclear projectile, through which Luis Alvarez, a scientist at the Educational institution of The Golden State, Berkeley, reads a paper while obtaining a hairstyle. Immediately, Alvarez jumps coming from his chair as well as sprints later on to locate his co-worker, the academic scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer.
“Oppie! Oppie!” he yells. “They’ve performed it. Hahn as well as Strassmann in Germany. They divided the uranium core. They broke the atom.”
The endorsement is actually to 2 German drug stores, Otto Hahn as well as Fritz Strassmann, that in 1939 unconsciously stated a demo of atomic fission, the splintering of an atom in to lighter factors. The exploration was actually essential to the New york Job, the top-secret United States initiative led through Oppenheimer to create the 1st atomic items.
Except the setting is actually certainly not totally correct, to the irritation of some experts. A primary gamer is actually overlooking coming from the imitation: Lise Meitner, a scientist that operated carefully along with Hahn as well as established the idea of atomic fission.
Meitner was actually a titan in her personal right, a present-day of Nobel laureates like Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr as well as Maximum Planck. After the 2nd nuclear tool was actually fallen on Nagasaki, the United States push termed her the “mama of the nuclear projectile,” an affiliation she emphatically denied.
Only Hahn gained the Nobel Reward for atomic fission. In his approval pep talk, he pertained to Meitner along with a German phrase that suggests associate or even staff member, depending on to Marissa Marsh, the writer of a latest publication concerning Meitner. “Or even a colleague at greatest,” she pointed out.
In 2022, Ms. Marsh filtered by means of Meitner’s store at the Educational institution of Cambridge. Ever since, she has actually converted thousands of characters in between Meitner as well as Hahn, filled in German, which she states provide an even more nuanced point of view of their partnership’s collapse. That knowledge likewise tests a typical assumption that Meitner approved the result of the Nobel Reward without cynicism.
The snub concerned greater than only sex, depending on to Ms. Marsh. “It’s very easy to mention she didn’t receive it given that she was actually a female,” Ms. Marsh pointed out. “One doesn’t believe a female is actually heading to make sounds concerning factors.” Ms. Marsh likewise strongly believes Meitner’s ancestry went to play: “This is actually an instance where it was actually given that she was actually a Jew.”
In 1947, Meitner contacted her nephew Otto Robert Frisch, a Jewish scientist that likewise brought about the breakthrough of atomic fission: “I understand that his mindset brought about the Nobel board determining versus our company,” she pointed out of Hahn, in a character converted through Ms. Marsh. “However that is actually completely personal things that our team don’t wish to reveal.”
Nobel Full week is actually an instant when the medical area commemorates its own best success however likewise, more and more, checks out laps as well as prejudices. Lise Meitner is just one of a lot of girls in scientific research that fell short to acquire as a result of credit score for their job, consisting of, probably very most significantly, Rosalind Franklin, the drug store that brought about the exploration of the dual coil design of DNA in 1953.
“There are actually hundreds, otherwise manies thousand, of girls that accomplish one thing terrific in scientific research that only didn’t receive acknowledged in their life time,” pointed out Katie Hafner, the lot of the podcast “Lost Female of Scientific Research.” Ms. Hafner just recently finished a two-part incident concerning Meitner, the 2nd one-half of which opens up along with the eventful Oppenheimer arena. Unlike various other plan her podcast, Ms. Hafner pointed out, “Lise Meitner is actually certainly not shed.”
But, she incorporated, “she is actually misconceived.”
A Contaminated Trailblazer
From the start, Meitner was actually damaging glass roofs. Birthed in 1878 in Vienna, she started analyzing natural sciences confidentially, as girls in Austria were actually certainly not permitted to go to university up until 1897. In 1901, she enlisted in graduate college at the Educational institution of Vienna; 5 years eventually she made a doctoral in natural sciences, merely the 2nd girl coming from her college to accomplish thus.
Meitner invested the remainder of her occupation functioning amongst the greats. She relocated to the Educational institution of Berlin as well as started bookkeeping lessons instructed through Maximum Planck, that gained the 1918 Nobel Reward in Natural Science — as well as that commonly performed certainly not permit girls to join his speaks.
In Berlin, Meitner likewise fulfilled Otto Hahn, a drug store that was actually around her grow older as well as possessed an even more modern mindset concerning dealing with girls. Hahn was actually likewise willing to team up along with Meitner, as scientists usually tended to possess a much better clutch on radioactivity, the power sent out through uncertain nuclear centers, than drug stores. However, as a female, Meitner was actually certainly not permitted upstairs in Hahn’s laboratory. So she operated — without income — in the cellar. (When she required to utilize the toilet, Ms. Marsh pointed out, Meitner must rush nearby.)
In 1912, Meitner as well as Hahn relocated to the Kaiser Wilhelm Principle for Chemical Make Up. All together, they uncovered a brand-new factor called protactinium. When the males at the Principle were actually prepared in the course of World war, Meitner was actually offered her personal natural sciences laboratory as well as the headline of lecturer, a stance that provided her awareness as well as the self-reliance to pursue her personal study.
But outside the realm of science, the walls were closing in. Antisemitism was on the rise, and in 1933 Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany. Many Jewish scientists left the country, but Meitner stayed, thinly protected by her Austrian citizenship and keen to hang on to the rare opportunity for a woman to conduct scientific research.
“I love physics with all my heart,” she wrote in a letter to a friend. “I can hardly imagine it not being part of my life.”
In 1938, Germany invaded Austria, leaving Meitner subject to the full extent of the Nazi regime. She opted to flee. The Nobel physics laureate Niels Bohr arranged for her to escape by train.
Meitner eventually made her way to Sweden, devastated at having had to leave behind her life’s work and concerned about the safety of her family.
She continued collaborating with Hahn by mail. He ran experiments, and she interpreted findings he did not understand. One result stumped them both: When uranium atoms were bombarded with neutrons, the neutron should have been absorbed and an electron released, creating a heavier element. Instead, Hahn found barium, a much lighter element. They were baffled.
The finding was outside of Hahn’s expertise as a chemist. “Perhaps you can come up with some sort of fantastic explanation,” he wrote in a letter to Meitner translated by Ruth Lewin Sime, a chemist at Sacramento City College who published a biography of Meitner in 1996. “If there is anything you could propose that you could publish, then it would still in a way be work by the three of us!”
Hahn and his colleague Fritz Strassmann submitted the results for publication in December of 1938. Their tone was uncertain. “There could perhaps be a series of unusual coincidences which has given us false indications,” they wrote in German.
Meitner was not included as an author, nor was there any mention of her contribution to the work.
A Theory Is Born
In Sweden, Meitner mulled over the results with Frisch, her physicist-nephew. One snowy day, Frisch recalled in a memoir, they took a walk, eventually stopping to sit on a tree trunk and scribble calculations on scraps of paper.
Uranium was extremely unstable, they realized, and likely to fracture on impact with, say, a neutron. Those fragments would be violently blasted apart. If one of those pieces were barium, Meitner mused, the other would have to be another light element called krypton. She computed the energy driving the blast using Einstein’s famous equation, E = mc².
Hahn and Strassmann had split the atom.
“We have read and considered your paper very carefully,” Meitner wrote to Hahn in January 1939. “Perhaps it is energetically possible for such a heavy nucleus to break up.” In a later letter, she expressed disappointment at being absent: “Even though I stand here with very empty hands, I am nevertheless happy for these wonderful findings.”
Meitner and Frisch published their theoretical interpretation of Hahn and Strassmann’s results in the February 1939 edition of the journal Nature. Frisch and Meitner devised experiments to test their hypothesis. In the following weeks, they published two more papers with the results, which became the first physical confirmation of what Frisch coined “nuclear fission.”
Behind the scenes, Meitner and Hahn’s correspondence spiraled into misunderstanding. Hahn thought that she was angry that he had published without her. “What else could I have done?” he wrote to Meitner. “Believe me, it would have been preferable for me if we could still work together and discuss things as we did before!”
Hahn was also receiving pushback for working with a Jewish scientist. “I don’t give these things much weight, of course, but didn’t want to confess to the gentlemen that you were the only one who found out everything immediately,” he wrote Meitner in 1939.
Later that year, Germany invaded Poland. World War II had begun. And the race was on to build an atomic bomb.
Word spread about nuclear fission. Though a single split atom did not generate enough energy for potential use in a weapon, some speculated that a chain reaction could do the trick. Bombarding uranium with neutrons not only produced lighter elements; it also created more neutrons. If those neutrons collided with more uranium, the reaction might sustain itself.
The American government assembled the Manhattan Project to develop such a weapon. Many of Meitner’s peers, including Frisch and Bohr, became involved. Einstein did not, although he had written a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt urging him to secure uranium and fund chain reaction experiments.
Meitner, though she had been invited, refused to join. (“I will have nothing to do with a bomb!” she famously said.) In 1945, after atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, leading to the end of the war, some newspaper stories claimed that Meitner had smuggled the recipe for the weapon out of Nazi Germany in her purse. She dismissed them. “You know so much more in America about the atomic bomb than I,” she told The New York Times in 1946.
In 1945, Hahn was nominated for the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, one year late, for the discovery of nuclear fission. Meitner and Frisch were also nominated for the physics prize that year. However only Hahn won.
A ‘Firm Tradition’
Details of Nobel Prize deliberations remain secret for 50 years after an award is given. After the documents surrounding Hahn’s win were released, scientific research historians published an analysis of the deliberations in Physics Today in 1997. “None of this embittered Meitner,” they wrote. “She complained very little, as well as forgave a great deal.”
Ms. Hafner takes issue with that stance. “Who is going to say, ‘Hey, I’m bitter’?” she said. “What are the optics of that?”
Ms. Moss thinks bitter is the wrong word. “She was actually very, very hurt,” she said of Meitner, at both the lack of credit and the passive loyalty she felt Hahn had to Germany.
“It was quite clear to me that Hahn was completely unaware of his unfriendly behavior,” Meitner wrote to a friend in 1946. “Naturally, the time together with him was somewhat painful, but I was prepared for it and held myself firm, bringing up no personal debates.”
Meitner was nominated again — five times — for the 1946 Nobel Prize in Physics. According to the authors of the Physics Today article, the Nobel committee argued that it was “firm tradition” to award the prize for experimental, rather than theoretical, discoveries.
But Demetrios Matsakis, a retired physicist of the U.S. Naval Observatory, said it is impossible to separate the “interplay between experimentalists and theorists. They need each other.” (Dr. Matsakis learned of Meitner in 2018, and was inspired to petition to rename another radioactive process, to recognize Meitner’s role in that discovery.)
Hahn deserved the award, but Meitner did, too, Dr. Matsakis said: “She should have gotten the Nobel Prize. There’s really no question about that.”
As an inverse comparison, experts note the case of Chien-Shiung Wu, a Chinese American physicist who ran experiments showing that some particle interactions do not obey mirror symmetry. In 1957, two of Wu’s male colleagues won the Nobel Prize in Physics for building the theory confirmed by her results.
The award recipient — the experimentalist or the theorist — “seems like it was reversed in these two cases,” said Harry Saal, a physicist who studied under Wu at Columbia University. “And in both cases the woman got screwed.”
Memorializing Meitner
In his later years, Hahn seemed to try to make amends. He and Meitner remained friends, and he offered her a head position at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, which she declined. In 1948, he nominated her for the Nobel Prize in Physics.
Meitner went on to be nominated 46 times for the Nobel in both physics and chemistry, however she never won. (To date, only four women have won in physics, most recently in 2020, and only eight have won in chemistry.)
In 1968, Meitner, then 89, died in England. An obituary that ran in The Times referred to her as an “atomic pioneer” and the “scientific partner of Otto Hahn, the Nobel Prize-winning nuclear chemist and the discoverer of nuclear fission.”
In 2020, the official Nobel Prize account on X, formerly known as Twitter, acknowledged that both Hahn and Meitner discovered nuclear fission. The post was accompanied through artwork showing Meitner standing behind Hahn, to the outrage of many people.
Any effort to award a Nobel to Meitner posthumously would be in vain. “Once a Nobel is given, there is no going back,” Dr. Sime said. The best that can be done is to acknowledge Meitner in the present, she added — as well as her omission from the new Oppenheimer film “was not excusable.”
Ms. Moss is still translating Meitner’s letters; so far, she has worked through more than 700 pages. “Now I’m just doing it because I fell in adore along with her,” she said. “She’s an incredible person.” She plans to write another book about Meitner with all the material that did not make it into the first one.
Earlier this year, Ms. Hafner and a buddy visited Meitner’s grave, located in a tiny English churchyard “in the middle of nowhere,” she said. It took them half an hour to find the faded tombstone, which was overgrown with weeds.
Ms. Hafner was surprised at how unremarkable the grave was for such “a giant in science,” she said. Still, she was comforted to find a stone perched atop the marker, a Jewish practice to honor the dead. Ms. Hafner added visitation stones for herself, Ms. Moss, Bohr, Einstein, Frisch and even Hahn.
This is how people are remembered, Ms. Hafner said. “Until we chip away at this and continue to remind people of the important work she did, it just won’t get recognized,” she added. So “we do everything we may to prepare the file right.”
