There’s a memorable scene in “Oppenheimer,” the blockbuster movie in regards to the constructing of the atomic bomb, during which Luis Alvarez, a physicist on the College of California, Berkeley, is studying a newspaper whereas getting a haircut. All of the sudden, Alvarez leaps from his seat and sprints down the street to search out his colleague, the theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer.
“Oppie! Oppie!” he shouts. “They’ve performed it. Hahn and Strassmann in Germany. They cut up the uranium nucleus. They cut up the atom.”
The reference is to 2 German chemists, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, who in 1939 unknowingly reported an indication of nuclear fission, the splintering of an atom into lighter parts. The invention was key to the Manhattan Undertaking, the top-secret American effort led by Oppenheimer to develop the primary nuclear weapons.
Besides the scene is just not completely correct, to the chagrin of some scientists. A serious participant is lacking from the portrayal: Lise Meitner, a physicist who labored intently with Hahn and developed the speculation of nuclear fission.
Meitner was an enormous in her personal proper, a recent of Nobel laureates like Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr and Max Planck. After the second atomic system was dropped on Nagasaki, the American press dubbed her the “mom of the atomic bomb,” an affiliation she vehemently rejected.
Solely Hahn received the Nobel Prize for nuclear fission. In his acceptance speech, he referred to Meitner with a German time period which means assistant or worker, in keeping with Marissa Moss, the creator of a latest ebook about Meitner. “Or a co-worker at greatest,” she stated.
In 2022, Ms. Moss sifted by means of Meitner’s archive on the College of Cambridge. Since then, she has translated a whole bunch of letters between Meitner and Hahn, written in German, which she says supply a extra nuanced perspective of their relationship’s demise. That perception additionally challenges a typical notion that Meitner accepted the result of the Nobel Prize with out resentment.
The snub was about extra than simply gender, in keeping with Ms. Moss. “It’s simple to say she didn’t get it as a result of she was a girl,” Ms. Moss stated. “One doesn’t assume a girl goes to make noise about issues.” Ms. Moss additionally believes Meitner’s heritage was at play: “It is a case the place it was as a result of she was a Jew.”
In 1947, Meitner wrote to her nephew Otto Robert Frisch, a Jewish physicist who additionally contributed to the invention of nuclear fission: “I do know that his perspective contributed to the Nobel committee deciding in opposition to us,” she stated of Hahn, in a letter translated by Ms. Moss. “However that’s purely personal stuff that we don’t wish to make public.”
Nobel Week is a second when the scientific neighborhood celebrates its biggest achievements but additionally, more and more, examines oversights and injustices. Lise Meitner is one among many ladies in science who didn’t obtain due credit score for his or her work, together with, maybe most notably, Rosalind Franklin, the chemist who contributed to the invention of the double helix construction of DNA in 1953.
“There are a whole bunch, if not hundreds, of girls who obtain one thing nice in science that simply didn’t get acknowledged of their lifetime,” stated Katie Hafner, the host of the podcast “Misplaced Girls of Science.” Ms. Hafner lately accomplished a two-part episode about Meitner, the second half of which opens with the fateful Oppenheimer scene. Not like different figures on her podcast, Ms. Hafner stated, “Lise Meitner is just not misplaced.”
However, she added, “she is misunderstood.”
A Radioactive Trailblazer
From the start, Meitner was breaking glass ceilings. Born in 1878 in Vienna, she started learning physics privately, as ladies in Austria weren’t allowed to attend school till 1897. In 1901, she enrolled in graduate college on the College of Vienna; 5 years later she earned a doctorate in physics, solely the second lady from her college to take action.
Meitner spent the remainder of her profession working among the many greats. She moved to the College of Berlin and started auditing lessons taught by Max Planck, who received the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics — and who typically didn’t enable ladies to attend his lectures.
In Berlin, Meitner additionally met Otto Hahn, a chemist who was round her age and had a extra progressive perspective about working with ladies. Hahn was additionally desirous to collaborate with Meitner, as physicists tended to have a greater grasp on radioactivity, the power emitted by unstable atomic nuclei, than chemists. However, as a girl, Meitner was not allowed upstairs in Hahn’s lab. So she labored — with out pay — within the basement. (When she wanted to make use of the restroom, Ms. Moss stated, Meitner needed to sprint throughout the road.)
In 1912, Meitner and Hahn moved to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry. Collectively, they found a brand new factor named protactinium. When the lads on the Institute have been drafted throughout World Conflict I, Meitner was given her personal physics lab and the title of professor, a place that granted her recognition and the independence to pursue her personal analysis.
However exterior the realm of science, the partitions have been closing in. Antisemitism was on the rise, and in 1933 Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany. Many Jewish scientists left the nation, however Meitner stayed, thinly protected by her Austrian citizenship and eager to hold on to the uncommon alternative for a girl to conduct scientific analysis.
“I like physics with all my coronary heart,” she wrote in a letter to a good friend. “I can hardly think about it not being a part of my life.”
In 1938, Germany invaded Austria, leaving Meitner topic to the complete extent of the Nazi regime. She opted to flee. The Nobel physics laureate Niels Bohr organized for her to flee by prepare.
Meitner ultimately made her approach to Sweden, devastated at having needed to go away behind her life’s work and anxious in regards to the security of her household.
She continued collaborating with Hahn by mail. He ran experiments, and she or he interpreted findings he didn’t perceive. One consequence stumped them each: When uranium atoms have been bombarded with neutrons, the neutron ought to have been absorbed and an electron launched, making a heavier factor. As an alternative, Hahn discovered barium, a a lot lighter factor. They have been baffled.
The discovering was exterior of Hahn’s experience as a chemist. “Maybe you possibly can give you some type of implausible clarification,” he wrote in a letter to Meitner translated by Ruth Lewin Sime, a chemist at Sacramento Metropolis Faculty who printed a biography of Meitner in 1996. “If there’s something you would suggest that you would publish, then it will nonetheless in a means be work by the three of us!”
Hahn and his colleague Fritz Strassmann submitted the outcomes for publication in December of 1938. Their tone was unsure. “There may maybe be a collection of bizarre coincidences which has given us false indications,” they wrote in German.
Meitner was not included as an creator, nor was there any point out of her contribution to the work.
A Idea Is Born
In Sweden, Meitner mulled over the outcomes with Frisch, her physicist-nephew. One snowy day, Frisch recalled in a memoir, they took a stroll, ultimately stopping to take a seat on a tree trunk and scribble calculations on scraps of paper.
Uranium was extraordinarily unstable, they realized, and more likely to fracture on affect with, say, a neutron. These fragments can be violently blasted aside. If a kind of items have been barium, Meitner mused, the opposite must be one other gentle factor referred to as krypton. She computed the power driving the blast utilizing Einstein’s well-known equation, E = mc².
Hahn and Strassmann had cut up the atom.
“We now have learn and thought of your paper very rigorously,” Meitner wrote to Hahn in January 1939. “Maybe it’s energetically potential for such a heavy nucleus to interrupt up.” In a later letter, she expressed disappointment at being absent: “Although I stand right here with very empty palms, I’m nonetheless pleased for these fantastic findings.”
Meitner and Frisch printed their theoretical interpretation of Hahn and Strassmann’s ends in the February 1939 version of the journal Nature. Frisch and Meitner devised experiments to check their speculation. Within the following weeks, they printed two extra papers with the outcomes, which turned the primary bodily affirmation of what Frisch coined “nuclear fission.”
Behind the scenes, Meitner and Hahn’s correspondence spiraled into misunderstanding. Hahn thought that she was offended that he had printed with out her. “What else may I’ve performed?” he wrote to Meitner. “Consider me, it will have been preferable for me if we may nonetheless work collectively and focus on issues as we did earlier than!”
Hahn was additionally receiving pushback for working with a Jewish scientist. “I don’t give these items a lot weight, after all, however didn’t wish to confess to the gents that you just have been the one one who discovered the whole lot instantly,” he wrote Meitner in 1939.
Later that yr, Germany invaded Poland. World Conflict II had begun. And the race was on to construct an atomic bomb.
Phrase unfold about nuclear fission. Although a single cut up atom didn’t generate sufficient power for potential use in a weapon, some speculated {that a} chain response may do the trick. Bombarding uranium with neutrons not solely produced lighter parts; it additionally created extra neutrons. If these neutrons collided with extra uranium, the response may maintain itself.
The American authorities assembled the Manhattan Undertaking to develop such a weapon. A lot of Meitner’s friends, together with Frisch and Bohr, turned concerned. Einstein didn’t, though he had written a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt urging him to safe uranium and fund chain response experiments.
Meitner, although she had been invited, refused to hitch. (“I’ll don’t have anything to do with a bomb!” she famously stated.) In 1945, after atomic bombs have been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, resulting in the top of the warfare, some newspaper tales claimed that Meitner had smuggled the recipe for the weapon out of Nazi Germany in her purse. She dismissed them. “You understand a lot extra in America in regards to the atomic bomb than I,” she instructed The New York Instances in 1946.
In 1945, Hahn was nominated for the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, one yr late, for the invention of nuclear fission. Meitner and Frisch have been additionally nominated for the physics prize that yr. However solely Hahn received.
A ‘Agency Custom’
Particulars of Nobel Prize deliberations stay secret for 50 years after an award is given. After the paperwork surrounding Hahn’s win have been launched, science historians printed an evaluation of the deliberations in Physics At present in 1997. “None of this embittered Meitner,” they wrote. “She complained little or no, and forgave an important deal.”
Ms. Hafner takes problem with that stance. “Who’s going to say, ‘Hey, I’m bitter’?” she stated. “What are the optics of that?”
Ms. Moss thinks bitter is the fallacious phrase. “She was very, very harm,” she stated of Meitner, at each the dearth of credit score and the passive loyalty she felt Hahn needed to Germany.
“It was fairly clear to me that Hahn was fully unaware of his unfriendly habits,” Meitner wrote to a good friend in 1946. “Naturally, the time along with him was considerably painful, however I used to be ready for it and held myself agency, citing no private debates.”
Meitner was nominated once more — 5 instances — for the 1946 Nobel Prize in Physics. In keeping with the authors of the Physics At present article, the Nobel committee argued that it was “agency custom” to award the prize for experimental, slightly than theoretical, discoveries.
However Demetrios Matsakis, a retired physicist of the U.S. Naval Observatory, stated it’s unattainable to separate the “interaction between experimentalists and theorists. They want one another.” (Dr. Matsakis realized of Meitner in 2018, and was impressed to petition to rename one other radioactive course of, to acknowledge Meitner’s function in that discovery.)
Hahn deserved the award, however Meitner did, too, Dr. Matsakis stated: “She ought to have gotten the Nobel Prize. There’s actually no query about that.”
As an inverse comparability, scientists observe the case of Chien-Shiung Wu, a Chinese language American physicist who ran experiments exhibiting that some particle interactions don’t obey mirror symmetry. In 1957, two of Wu’s male colleagues received the Nobel Prize in Physics for constructing the speculation confirmed by her outcomes.
The award recipient — the experimentalist or the theorist — “looks like it was reversed in these two circumstances,” stated Harry Saal, a physicist who studied below Wu at Columbia College. “And in each circumstances the lady obtained screwed.”
Memorializing Meitner
In his later years, Hahn appeared to attempt to make amends. He and Meitner remained mates, and he supplied her a head place on the Max Planck Institute in Germany, which she declined. In 1948, he nominated her for the Nobel Prize in Physics.
Meitner went on to be nominated 46 instances for the Nobel in each physics and chemistry, however she by no means received. (So far, solely 4 ladies have received in physics, most lately in 2020, and solely eight have received in chemistry.)
In 1968, Meitner, then 89, died in England. An obituary that ran in The Instances referred to her as an “atomic pioneer” and the “scientific associate of Otto Hahn, the Nobel Prize-winning nuclear chemist and the discoverer of nuclear fission.”
In 2020, the official Nobel Prize account on X, previously generally known as Twitter, acknowledged that each Hahn and Meitner found nuclear fission. The submit was accompanied by paintings exhibiting Meitner standing behind Hahn, to the outrage of many individuals.
Any effort to award a Nobel to Meitner posthumously can be in useless. “As soon as a Nobel is given, there is no such thing as a going again,” Dr. Sime stated. The most effective that may be performed is to acknowledge Meitner within the current, she added — and her omission from the brand new Oppenheimer movie “was not excusable.”
Ms. Moss remains to be translating Meitner’s letters; to date, she has labored by means of greater than 700 pages. “Now I’m simply doing it as a result of I fell in love along with her,” she stated. “She’s an unimaginable individual.” She plans to write down one other ebook about Meitner with all the fabric that didn’t make it into the primary one.
Earlier this yr, Ms. Hafner and a good friend visited Meitner’s grave, positioned in a tiny English churchyard “in the course of nowhere,” she stated. It took them half an hour to search out the pale tombstone, which was overgrown with weeds.
Ms. Hafner was stunned at how unremarkable the grave was for such “an enormous in science,” she stated. Nonetheless, she was comforted to discover a stone perched atop the marker, a Jewish follow to honor the useless. Ms. Hafner added visitation stones for herself, Ms. Moss, Bohr, Einstein, Frisch and even Hahn.
That is how persons are remembered, Ms. Hafner stated. “Till we chip away at this and proceed to remind folks of the necessary work she did, it simply received’t get acknowledged,” she added. So “we do the whole lot we are able to to set the file straight.”