Talk:Otto Hahn

message: I question the claim on this page that Hahn worked on the German fission weapon program.  For example, this article suggests otherwise:
http://www.britannica.com/nobel/micro/254_40.html
So does this one: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/GERhahn.htm:
: Hahn had a strong dislike for Adolf Hitler and his government and told a friend: "If my work would lead to Hitler having an atomic bomb I would kill myself."
If Hahn did participate in some way we should state clearly what he did.  Peter Hendrickson — Preceding undated comment added 03:13, 26 June 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Untitled

message: I'm confused by this statement:  "Later few American Jewish historians considered [Lise Meitner's] contributions to have been the greater . . . ."  This use of "few" means "not many" and has a definite negative connotation (i.e., it really means the same as "most American Jewish historians did not consider Meitner's contributions to have been the greater".  Is this true?  If the writer meant Meitner's work was considered by some to have been more important than Hahn's, then I would propose changing "few" to "some", or maybe even "many". Richwales 19:39, 18 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: There was also considerable controversy from anti-Germans and anti-Nazis that he had downplayed the role of Lise Meitner, a former Jew and a woman, in their collaboration such that she was excluded in the credit and the Nobel Prize. Some historians have asserted that her contributions were equal if not greater, and in a controversial survey of Nobel Prize winners conducted forty years later Lise Meitner was voted the most deserving of those who had not received the award.
Jheald 17:27, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Lise Meitner, and 1944 Nobel controversy 

message: I took them off of this page and put them in wikiquote, since it seems more appropriate Acornwithwings 06:11, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  quotes about hahn 

message: Do I smell an error here? Then-"Radioactinium" IMHO has nothing to do with actinium, but it's a historical name for the isotope thorium-227! Hence, I don't see why you are linking to the Actinium article here. -andy 77.191.205.168 (talk) 16:01, 9 January 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: If you have a reliable source for radioactinium being thorium-227, I'll change the redirect accordingly.--Roentgenium111 (talk) 16:37, 9 January 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: I just noticed this today and I have found a source. See Joseph Angelo, Nuclear Technology, p.117. Angelo says that "radiothorium" is Th-228 and "radioactinium" is Th-227, and that the original names were given by Hahn when working as a postdoc for Rutherford in 1904-1906. This was before atomic numbers were assigned or isotopes were understood, so it is not surprising that the inital identifications were very confused. Dirac66 (talk) 02:45, 11 September 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Radioactinium" 

message: Why does the first paragraph not identify him as a discoverer of nuclear fission?  
HowardMorland (talk) 21:15, 12 August 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: Discoverer of Nuclear Fission

message: Is Otto Hahn the inventor of the water-tap (faucet)? In german it translates to Wasserhahn. Just a "theory". User:ScotXWt@lk 10:34, 26 June 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  water-tap or faucet 

message: The article on the Battle of Caporetto says: 
In September three experts from the Imperial General Staff led by the chemist Otto Hahn went to the Isonzo front to find a site suitable for a gas attack.
The article on Hahn has a brief mention of his involvement in chemical warfare, under "discovery of protactinium." I suggest adding a subhead on chemical warfare, to give this aspect of his life a bit more prominence, with a cross-ref. to the Battle of Caporetto. Oaklandguy (talk) 20:48, 14 November 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  A bit more about chemical warfare in WWI 

message: I don't think that Meitner and Frisch were involved in the fission experiment until after the data were collected. Their brilliant 1939 paper explained the results obtained by Hahn and Strassmann a year earlier in Berlin, but at that time the actual experiment was complete. My understanding is that Hahn and Strassmann were the experimental half of the team, and Meitner and Frisch were the theoretical half. The current wording in the article makes it sound like Meitner (but not Frisch) was one of the experimentalists. I believe that when the experiments were performed at the lab in Berlin, Meitner was already a refugee in Sweden because of her race.
Note that the Nobel prize was awarded to Hahn (but not to Strassmann for some reason) for the experiment, and not to Meitner and Frisch for the theory. Rwflammang (talk) 17:13, 9 May 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Meitner did not bombard uranium with neutrons 

message: - More curious than challenging you:  So you are saying the quote is not in a reliable source?  How are you certain it didn't happen?  --John (User:Jwy/talk) 19:16, 6 June 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: I've checked Jeremy Bernstein, Hitler’s Uranium Club: The Secret Recordings at Farm Hall, pp. 133-137. The quote from Cole comes from the translator's notes in the 2001 edition of Hoffmann's book; I don't have that book (and the library has lost its copy), and the article writer had the earlier 1993 edition, and Badash writing in 1983 so must have had a still earlier copy. So I removed the quite under WP:NOTFALSE.  Hawkeye7 (discuss) 20:47, 6 June 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Sounds reasonable.  Thanks --John (User:Jwy/talk) 22:33, 6 June 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Removed Quote 

message: Today I made some 65 edits. Not all are cut and dried improvements, for example see my es's. Other questions I met and could not answer completely:
1. How to note isotopes? And wikilink them? They appear in contemporary names (mesothorium I), modern names (uranium-234), uranium X2 (protactinium-234), plus wrong or dead-end names.
Can we use a convention to: write contemporary name throughout (when describing a contemporal process). At introduction, add modern name in ()-brackets, and wl'ed (the wl to precise article/section as possible; at least the Isotopes of ... page).
Repeat this for every section (ie, introduce an isotope in every section where it is used; once/article is not helpful IMO).
I would not mind when someone uses the symbolic notation also (234U), to describe a process (like alpha-decay, or beta-decay). This is better than, as a reader, having to make written notes while reading ;-) )
::I needed a list while writing! All the sources used the old names and while the Wikipedia notes them in the "isotopes of..." articles, often you didn't know what element they were. I constructed a table. Each of the old names is followed by a modern one in parentheses. The new names are anachronistic until Chadwick's discovery of the neutron in 1932. Even isotopes were not discovered until 1913; before that Hahn was credited with discovering new elements.  I stuck with linking each element on first appearance. In some cases isotopes have their own articles, some have a section in the isotopes article, and some are merely part of a table of isotopes. Hahn nearly blew the symbolic notation out of the water when he discovered nuclear isomerism. We could say  but many readers won't know what I'm talking about. I decided not to use the chemical symbols as those of elements like protactinium are not well known. However, the Discovery of nuclear fission article uses them extensively.  Hawkeye7 (discuss) 22:58, 30 June 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Is WP:CHEMNAME of any help? --John (User:Jwy/talk) 02:47, 1 July 2020 (UTC)
replies: text:  WP:CHEMNAME does not solve this issue: when Hahn discovered new species, they gave odd names to what were isotopes etc. This Hahn article could use a good old-name/current-name translation table in the text, while preventing being illegible ;-) -DePiep (talk) 20:51, 5 July 2020 (UTC)

text: Wow! You people are more educated than I but THANK YOU for saying cut & dried! As a word/grammar/spelling person, drives me nuts that people think it's "cut & dry". It's not! Glad to see some actual smart people on here. Mlgcb (talk) 05:25, 9 January 2024 (UTC)

text: The abbreviation is KWG.  I avoided the use of abbreviations where possible.  Hawkeye7 (discuss) 22:58, 30 June 2020 (UTC)

text: Thanks. I found him a pretty complicated person. The article tells the reader a lot about the development of radiochemistry over a half a century, and also a lot about science in Germany. Note that the it is up for review at WP:GAN.  Hawkeye7 (discuss) 22:58, 30 June 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Thoughts on edits 

message: The personal history of Otto Hahn should have included an explicit listing of his academic credentials. For example, the article says, "A graduate of the University of Marburg," but does not state what field he graduated from nor the academic level---bachelors? Masters? Doctorate? 38.124.147.11 (talk) 17:37, 26 February 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: * The article does provide this. It says: "In 1901, Hahn received his doctorate in Marburg for a dissertation entitled "On Bromine Derivates of Isoeugenol", a topic in classical organic chemistry... Hahn completed his habilitation in the spring of 1907, and became a Privatdozent. A thesis was not required; the Chemical Institute accepted one of his publications on radioactivity instead." Hawkeye7 (discuss) 23:32, 26 February 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Academic history 

message: In this section we read that all the captive scientists were held at Chateau Facqueval. This is not referenced but after some searching I found the following article https://www.dissident-media.org/infonucleaire/bombe_reich.pdf dated in 1993. It is written in French but does confirm that they were held in Chateau Facqueval. Maybe somebody could create a reference in the page. Everybody got to be somewhere! (talk) 23:48, 7 February 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Incarceration section 

message: Hello to everyone that has contributed to this specific article. 
As per the information I have recently corrected in other articles pertaining to nuclear fission and who did what when, this lede is not correct or accurate in many aspects. It also contradicts other articles quite significantly. Hahn and Strassmann only observed nuclear fission and accidentally when they conducted specific experiments based on Lise Meitner's theoretical suppositions pertaining to research all three had been conducting, but after Mietner had fled Nazi Germany in July. On 19 December 1938 when Hahn and Strassmann conducted a specific bombardment of uranium with neutrons, they misinterpreted their findings regardless of the fact they published them mere days afterwards in a German-only publication. Hahn informed Meitner literally that same evening with their findings, but it took Otto Robert Frisch and Meitner to correctly interpret the theoretical data of Hahn and Strassmann whilst Frisch visited his aunty Lise exiled in Sweden later in December, as he regularly did prior to fleeing Nazi Germany himself in 1933. Frisch and Meitner correctly deduced the observation of Hahn and Strassmann, but it was only Frisch who replicated and confirmed it was replicable in mid-January 1939, as Meitner was still in Sweden.
Frisch published their corrected findings in February. During Frisch's experimentation at Neil Bohr's Institute in Copenhagen, which he'd been exiled to since 1934 as a Jewish-Austrian like his aunt Lise. However, it was Bohr who took this news to the USA with Leon Rosenfeld, and it was Rosenfeld who told John Dunning and Herbert Anderson who had just begun working with Enrico Fermi (exiled from Fascist Italy due to his wife being Jewish-Italian in December 1938) at Columbia University in New York City. CU physics staff also included Leo Szilard, who is the first person to conceive a nuclear chain reaction in 1933 when exiled to London from Nazism as a Jewish-Hungarian. 
The experiments of Fermi and Szilard in New York with Bohr, Dunning, Anderson, etc, concurrently occur when Frisch is conducting his experiments to confirm the correct reinterpretation of Hanh and Strassmann's findings, thus it is only Frisch and Meitner who actually discover what had occurred - not Hahn or Strassmann. Frisch is unaware of Bohr letting the cat out of the bag, considering he had asked him not to prior to leaving for the USA in January 1939, and it is Frisch who actually confirmed, and named, nuclear fission through discussions with Bohr in Copenhagen. Hahn did not discover nuclear fission because he misinterpreted his findings, just like Irene Joliot-Curie and Pavle Savic misinterpreted their findings earlier in 1938 conducting similar experiments, which Meitner also corrected and reinterpreted (a fact Irene Curie later acknowledged prior to her death), and from which Hahn and Strassmann could even conduct their experiment to begin with. Irene and Frederic Joliot-Curie only conducted their experiments in Paris due to Enrico Fermi's team in Rome conducting research based on Leo Szilard and Thomas Chalmers in 1934, that discovered the Szilard-Chalmers effect of isotopic separation, which itself was based on Fermi's experiment from earlier in 1934, and again itself relied upon publications by the Joliot-Curie's earlier in 1933. All these publications were predominantly published in Nature and from which each team continued their research. 
Hahn and Strassmann did not discover nuclear fission nor name it, they accidentally observed it and got it wrong. Frisch confirms nuclear fission is replicable and Bohr corrected the record that it is indeed Frisch who first confirmed nuclear fission come late-February 1939, but unfortunately after he, Fermi, Szilard, Dunning, Anderson and other physicists in the USA had begun to conduct their own research from Meitner and Frisch's correct reinterpretation. This is because Frisch had not responded to Bohr's telegrams until 20-22 January about were his experiments were at in Copenhagen. 
The circumstances are articulated much more accurately and correctly within the other articles lede, but not on Hahn's for some reason, even though Hahn's links to these articles. Obviously, such corrections should be conducted for Hahn. Also, he is not the 'father of nuclear fission or nuclear chemistry' and I've never in all my research ever come across anyone labelling Hahn as such in any fashion. All of Hahn's most important achievements are conducted with Meitner during their decades of joint research prior to July 1938 when Meitner was forced to flee Berlin. 
It remains a black mark on the Nobel committee for the fact Hahn was solely awarded the Prize for Chemistry, and it remains a misogynist and bigoted decision considering Meitner became a Swedish citizen in 1949, and everyone who matter within in physics had nominated Meitner for the prize nearly 40 times before Hahn was awarded it, a fact ignored in Hahn's lede but illustrated on Meitner's page. I feel there needs to be some rather extensive corrections to Hahn's lede and to his overall story post haste regarding his true contributions to nuclear chemistry and by default nuclear physics. WolfStonerRocker  G'DÄŸ 00:53, 5 June 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  This lede does not conform with other pages on nuclear fission and its discovery