A Heroine of the Science World

Kevin Pitts paused, ever so briefly, when asked: Who is your favorite scientist?

“I have two, actually,” he said.

One is Carl Sagan, who most of us know: “Carl, more for his ability to communicate science, and to communicate what I would call critical thinking,” Pitts said.

The second one, who Pitts named first, many non-physicists have never heard of: Lise Meitner.

“Her discoveries were truly transformative,” Pitts began, “but what she overcame being a female scientist 100 years ago, I don’t think we can even imagine — not to mention all the challenges of Nazi Germany, so she’s just off the charts in terms of how remarkable she is.”

Meitner was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1878 and enrolled at University of Vienna in 1901 to study physics. She obtained her doctorate in 1906 and moved to Berlin, Germany, to work with Max Planck (who originated quantum theory) and Otto Hahn, with whom she worked for three decades.

With Meitner’s expertise in physics, and Hahn’s knowledge of chemistry, the pair discovered the element protactinium, according to the website Atomic Archive.

In 1922, Meitner discovered a radiation-less transition, which involves the energy that is released when a core electron is removed from an atom and replaced. Though Meitner published her research, two years later a French physicist named Pierre Auger reported the same finding. That scientific discovery is now known as “the Auger effect.”

In 1938, when Austria was annexed by Adolph Hitler’s Germany, Meitner fled to Sweden to work at Manne Siegbahn’s Institute in Stockholm, where she had little support due to the institute’s prejudice against women, Atomic Archive reported. Meitner and Otto Hahn met secretly in Copenhagen to plan a new series of experiments, which would lay fundamental groundwork for our understanding of nuclear reactions.

In February 1939, Meitner published the physical explanation of the experimental reactions and named the process nuclear fission. Meitner’s work prompted Albert Einstein to pen a warning letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who used the information to initiate the Manhattan Project.

In 1944, Hahn received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his research into nuclear fission, the very term Meitner had coined. Hahn downplayed Meitner’s role, and she was ignored.

Despite her decades-long snubbing by the scientific community, Meitner was celebrated by the American press after World War II as the person “who left Germany with the bomb in my purse.”

She moved permanently to Cambridge, England, in 1960, where she died in 1968.

Long after her death, she finally received lasting recognition from the scientific community. In 1982, German scientists created an extremely radioactive element, with the atomic number 109.

Its periodic table symbol is: Mt. It is named, Meitnerium.