Lise Meitner

Lise Meitner explained nuclear fission and was omitted from the Nobel Prize awarded for it. Born in Vienna in 1878, the third of eight children of a Jewish lawyer, she could not attend a boys' gymnasium and prepared privately for the university entrance examination, entering Vienna in 1901 and taking a doctorate in physics in 1905, only the second woman to do so there. She moved to Berlin in 1907 to hear Max Planck lecture, and began a thirty-year collaboration with the chemist Otto Hahn. Women were barred from the chemistry institute, so she worked unpaid in a converted carpentry workshop with a separate entrance and no access to the laboratories upstairs. She was not given a paid position until 1913. She and Hahn discovered the isotope protactinium-231 in 1918, and she did fundamental work on beta radiation and the Auger effect, which is named after the man who found it two years later. She was protected by her Austrian citizenship until the Anschluss in March 1938, and then fled Germany in July with two suitcases and a diamond ring Hahn gave her for emergencies, crossing the Dutch border on an invalid permit. She settled in Stockholm with almost no laboratory support. In December 1938 Hahn wrote to her about the barium he and Strassmann could not explain. Over Christmas, walking in the snow at Kungälv with her nephew Otto Frisch, she used the liquid drop model to work out that the nucleus had split, and calculated the energy released from Einstein's mass-energy relation. Frisch named it fission. The 1944 chemistry prize went to Hahn alone. She refused to work on the bomb, and died in 1968.

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