From: jac@ds8.scri.fsu.edu (Jim Carr)
Newsgroups: sci.physics
Subject: Re: Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn
Date: 26 Sep 92 16:45:16 GMT
Reply-To: jac@ds8.scri.fsu.edu (Jim Carr)
Organization: SCRI, Florida State University

In article <slaven.717370804@pv740a.vincent.iastate.edu> slaven@iastate.edu (Dave Slaven) writes:
>I just got this catalog for physics films in the mail.  The
>description of one of them begins:
>
>"Lise Meitner accomplished a lot of firsts -- from being among the
>first women admitted to the University of Vienna to being the first
>woman to have a man take credit for her work and receive the Nobel
>Prize for it."

Otto Hahn won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1944 for 
the "discovery" of the fission of heavy nuclei.

He did make the key observation, that the chemistry of the radioactive 
materials produced (first by Fermi) by neutron bombardment of uranium 
were not, as Fermi supposed, heavy elements like Radium but rather 
Barium.  He proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt (except for his own), 
that the product was either Barium or something almost identical to 
it.  He did not believe his own results and wrote a very cautious 
paper, mainly because he thought such a product was impossible 
from energy considerations.  His *paper* was, however, definitive 
as far as the facts were concerned. 

He sent Lise Meitner a preprint (actually a carbon copy ! of the draft). 
She had fled Germany because of her Jewish ancestry, but had worked 
with Hahn a great deal.  Meitner was a very skilled physicist, and 
immediately saw that this had to be fission.  She discussed it with 
her nephew Frisch while on holiday, and they worked out the basic 
ideas and numbers while on a walk.  She and Frisch messed around 
with the liquid drop concept, Frisch guesstimated the 200 MeV energy 
release from the surface/coulomb energy changes, and Meitner supplied 
the fact -- she had memorized the binding energy tables so no need to 
go back for any books! -- that 1/5 of a nuceon mass or 200 MeV 
would be available.  Thus they had the model and that it was 
energetically plausible.  Frisch then measured the fission products 
in Copenhagen and also (I think) coined the name "fission" by 
analogy to cell division.  They published the fission paper together 
and Frisch published the experimental paper simultaneously, both 
in Nature.  By all the "rules" we follow today, Meitner and Frisch 
actually "discovered" fission in the data of Hahn and Strassman. 

>This sort of grabbed my eye, because i haven't heard this story
>before.  Without buying the film ($149), where can i find out the
>story behind this (the Nobel Prize part, not the Vienna part)?

The most detailed discussion is in Rhodes book  "The Making of the 
Atomic Bomb".  He devotes many pages to the sequence of events, gives 
the relevant papers in the notes, and covers this particular series 
of events in great detail over maybe 20-30 pages.  He describes 
many things that I left out above, and you can form your own opinion 
about whether Hahn deserved the prize for this experiment. 

The only thing that might be hyperbole in the film is that Meitner 
was a Physicist, and might not have been considered for the Chemistry
prize because of that and the theoretical nature of her work.  She 
certainly deserved the Nobel for her insight, although Frisch and 
many others made similarly great contributions and did not win either.  
Not nearly as clear-cut a case as in the DNA story, where Rosalind (?) 
Franklin actually made the measurements and the correct interpretation 
of the measurements.  The excuse there is that she had died by the 
time the award was made, and was thus not eligible, but begs the 
question of why others who did not make the real discovery were 
considered eligible! 

--
J. A. Carr                                    |  "The New Frontier of which I  
jac@gw.scri.fsu.edu                           |  speak is not a set of promises
Florida State University  B-186               |  -- it is a set of challenges."
Supercomputer Computations Research Institute |   John F. Kennedy (15 July 60)
Newsgroups: sci.physics