(1878-1968) THIS JEWISH PHYSICIST INDIRECTLY CONTRIBUTED TO THE CREATION OF THE WORLD’S FIRST ATOMIC BOMB. BUT SHE WAS NOT HAPPY TO SEE HER WORK USED IN THE SERVICE OF DEATH AND DESTRUCTION.
In 1939 Lise Meitner sent a desperate cable from Sweden to a British colleague. The wire referred to a non-existent woman - “Maude Ray Kent”. “Maude Ray” was the code name for radium. Meitner just learned the Germans were stockpiling the element. The cable was meant as a warning. Lise Meitner escaped from Germany a year earlier, with the help of noted physicist Niels Bohr. Berlin, the center of the physics world, had been her home for 30 years. She came to the city in 1907 with a PdD, and collaborated with German chemist Otto Hahn.
Women were not allowed in the lab at the Berlin Institute. So they were forced to work in a converted carpenter’s shop in the basement, researching radioactive substances. Eventually Meitner rose to chair the university. But by 1938, Germany was no longer safe for the Jewish scientist. Meitner fled north and the work continued long distance. In Germany, Hahn noted that barium was produced by bombarding uranium with neutrons. In Denmark, Meitner explained the nuclear process and named it “fission”. Otto Hahn won the Nobel Prize for chemistry. Meitner was not recognized. Her discoveries led to work on the atomic bomb, and Lise Meitner was offered work on the Manhattan project. A pacifist, she not only turned down the job...but stopped her work in fission entirely. In 1966 Lise Meitner became the first woman to share in the prestigious Fermi Prize...for her contributions to the discovery of fission. Contributions that led to a bomb she wanted no part of.
Credits: Lise Meitner image is courtesy of the Churcill Archives Centre. Original material held at Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College, Cambridge, CB 3 ODS United Kingdom.
For more information, please visit:
http://www.museum.vic.gov.au/scidiscovery/scientists/meitner.asp
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