by mandevil | 2025-12-09 23:53:19+00:00
Lise Meitner is a fascinating case of how all of this works.

Otto Hahn had run the radioactivity department at the Max Planck Institute (at the time the Kaiser Wilhelm Society) for most of the 1920's and 1930's, working very closely with Lise Meitner- the two published numerous papers together, sharing credit. The two were really close friends. Eventually a third guy, Frtiz Strassman joined and they wrote more papers as the three of them, though Otto was the senior scientist and the head of the department, so definitely had more social and scientific capital than either of the other two. He was not a Nazi, but was considered Aryan by the Nazis, as was Strassman. But Meitner was Jewish. Hahn helped her escape to Denmark, where she met her nephew (and fellow scientist) Otto Frisch who had fled earlier. Then in 1938 Stressman and Hahn did an experiment and couldn't explain it; following their pattern for the past three decades, when Hahn had an experiment he couldn't explain he took it Meitner and she figured it out, this time with her nephew. Meitner and Frisch told Hahn and Strassman they needed a chemist, and the four turned to the chemist Wilhelm Traube to confirm that bucket of uranium now had barium in it, and now they had proof that fission had occurred.

So Hahn and Strassman had conducted the experiment, Meitner and Frisch had explained it, and Traube had proved the explanation correct- in a modern scientific context all five of their names would be on the same paper. But because of the Nazi's Hahn had met Meitner in Copenhagen to explain the findings to her, and then she had telegraphed back what to look for when she and Frisch understood what had happened. And it was essentially impossible for Hahn and Strassman to publish this paper with Meitner's name on it- not because she was a woman (they had published many times with all three names on it at this point) but because the Nazis would not allow Aryans and Jews to publish papers together. So Meitner and Frisch had a paper published in Nature a few weeks after the one by Hahn and Strassman had been published in Naturwissenschafte. Hahn and Strassman both considered Meitner especially to be a co-discoverer of fission with them (Frisch was not directly involved with the two in Berlin, but he had worked with Meitner after Hahn had explained to her.)

During the war Traube, who was also Jewish, died in SS custody (Hahn claims that he was a few hours too late to get him released- and he definitely helped Meitner escape so it is not implausible). Meitner became a Swedish citizen[1]. Frisch co-wrote the MAUD report urging the British to build an atomic bomb, and then went to Los Alamos to actually work on the first Atomic bomb. This does point to a major underlying problem that any notional German atomic bomb program might have- 60% of the Grossdeutschland team who discovered fission were either killed by Nazis or fled them, with only two members of the team available to a (notional) German atomic bomb program and one in New Mexico working on the (actually existing) UN program.

So the question becomes, why did Hahn alone get the Nobel for fission when it was such a collaboration? Here the answer is, geopolitics. If you look at the records of the Nobel committee in November 1945 (they announced the 1944 and 1945 prizes together in November 1945 with the war over) [2] there was clearly international politics involved.

"...concerns the prizes awarded under the exceptional conditions that reigned in the immediate aftermaths of the two world wars. In both periods, decisions were influenced by the political notion that the prizes, awarded by Swedish scientists who had remained neutral in the conflicts, could be used to reestablish prewar internationalism in science. One way to do that was to rehabilitate the losers."[3] So that is why Germany got the 1919 and 1944 Nobel Prizes, and Meitner didn't get any credit from the Nobel committee.

1: Accord to https://physicstoday.aip.org/features/a-nobel-tale-of-postwa... this actually hurt Meitner's chances: in 1945 when the prizes were being awarded she was working for a Swedish previous Nobel winner Manne Siegbahn and was very unhappy, and left his lab in 1946, and he was one of the key voices in the Nobel awarding committee and seems to have held a grudge against her. 2: ibid 3: ibid