Lise Meitner explained nuclear fission, and the Nobel went to her partner
Over Christmas 1938, exiled in Sweden, Lise Meitner and her nephew worked out what Otto Hahn's puzzling Berlin results meant: uranium nuclei were splitting in two. They named it fission. Hahn alone received the 1944 Nobel Prize for the discovery, although Meitner was nominated 49 times across chemistry and physics.
Meitner was born in Vienna in November 1878, the third of eight children in a Jewish family; her father, a chess master, was among the first Jewish lawyers allowed to practise in Austria. At eight she kept notes on her experiments under her pillow, fascinated by the colours of oil slicks and thin films. Teaching was the only career open to women, so she trained to teach French. When Vienna's universities opened to women in 1897, she crammed the missing years of schooling into two, and in July 1901 was one of four among fourteen women to pass the entrance exam.
At the University of Vienna she was captivated by Ludwig Boltzmann's lectures, and in 1906 became only the second woman to earn a physics doctorate there. With her father's financial backing she moved to Berlin, where Max Planck let her attend his lectures. Prussia still barred women from universities, so her collaboration with the chemist Otto Hahn began in a former woodworking shop in the basement with its own outside entrance. Together they published nine papers in 1908 and 1909 and developed radioactive recoil as a way to separate elements. In 1912 both moved to the new Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry, and she became Germany's first woman full professor of physics.
Nazi racial laws cost her those posts in 1935, and the 1938 annexation of Austria took her citizenship. On 13 and 14 July 1938 the Dutch physicist Dirk Coster helped her escape to the Netherlands, and she settled in Stockholm. That year Hahn and Fritz Strassmann found barium forming when uranium was hit with neutrons. Meitner and Otto Robert Frisch supplied the physics, Frisch confirmed the process on 13 January 1939, and their paper in Nature that February coined the word fission.
Many have called her omission from the Nobel unjust. She was nonetheless invited to the Lindau gathering of laureates in 1962, and in 1997 element 109 was named meitnerium in her honour. She died on 27 October 1968, having become a Swedish citizen.
Source: Lise Meitner
