Lise Meitner: the (forgotten) scientist who explained nuclear fission
By: Marina Navarro Lins
Tags: Women In Science, Science, Physics, Nobel Prize, Nuclear Energy

The physicist Lise Meitner

Element 109 of the periodic table is a tricky one. Extremely radioactive and heavy, it doesn’t exist in nature and can only be synthesized inside laboratories — a glimpse of a few seconds before its decay. Elusive, it made it through the scientific-egotistic battles to baptize elements 102 to 108 and, without controversy, was officially named meitnerium in 1997. The physicist Lise Meitner remains until this day — when Mendeleev’s table completes 150 years — as the only woman to have been solely remembered among the 118 chemical elements, since Marie Curie shares the tribute with her husband. Like meitnerium, Lise spent most of her time in labs that focused on radioactivity. Unlike element 109, she had a long complex life, filled with obstacles, world-changing findings and bitter injustices.

Born into a Jewish middle-class household in Vienna, Austria, in 1878, Meitner was the third of eight children. In contrast to most families at the time, the Meitners encouraged their daughters to go beyond the 19th century standard education for girls, which ended when they turned 14. In 1901, Lise joined the University of Vienna and started having classes with Franz Exner, who initiated radioactivity research in the country. It was there that she completed her PhD — only the second woman to do so at the institution.

Her exceptional resume was often overshadowed by the fact that Lise was a woman in the beginning of the 20th century. At first, she had to settle for a job teaching at a girl’s school, while conducting independent research in the evening. In 1907, the physicist got Max Planck’s permission to attend his lectures at the University of Berlin, where she soon started 30 year-old collaboration with the experimental chemist Otto Hahn. Since women were not allowed to work in the institute laboratories until 1909, Lise was firstly placed at a former carpenter’s closet in the basement and had to use the toilet at a restaurant outside the building.

Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn in Berlin, in 1913

The partnership between Meitner and Hahn led to important findings, but it also highlighted the gender imbalance existent in a field that, in theory, is based on reason. Even after Lise fled Berlin and found exile in Sweden, in 1938, Hahn went to her for an explanation to why, when bombarded with neutrons, uranium splits into lighter elements. Needless to say, he got his answer. The discovery of nuclear fission earned Hahn a Nobel Prize, but Meitner wasn’t even acknowledged in his acceptance speech. Years earlier, a black and white picture shows the two scientists in the lab: the 35 year-old Lise wearing a long-sleeved white dress, her black hair tied in the back of her head, holds some instruments stiffly; Hahn, on the other hand, is comfortably leaning on a table and making notes. Meitner’s gaze is on Hahn’s notepad, even though it seems a bit vague. The photo demonstrates how their collaboration was often portrayed — an intellectually uneven relationship that made people refer to Meitner as Hahn’s subordinate co-worker.

The discovery of nuclear fission was to give her another headache. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki were obliterated by atomic bombs, in 1945, Lise’s name was dug up from an inaccurate newspaper article published five years earlier and she soon became known by the press as the ‘Jewish mother of the bomb’. Not only had the physicist refused to join the Manhattan Project, she also defended peaceful uses for atomic energy. The inscription on her tombstone chosen by her nephew and colleague, Otto Frisch, is ‘A physicist who never lost her humanity’.

Lise Meitner’s trajectory is a tricky one. Even though she had an accomplished career and a well-documented role in the development of physics, it is impossible to dissociate her scientific contribution from the injustices she faced. In order to tell her story, you need to work with dichotomies: the brilliant scientist who was forgotten; the pacifist who was accused creating the atomic bomb; the heavy smoker who lived 89 years; the betrayed friend who forgave. Looking back on her life, in 1964, Lise realizes “that life need not be easy provided only it was not empty”. “And this wish I have been granted”, the physicist concludes.