Lise Meitner

Born on 7 November 1878 in Austria, Lise Meitner was a physicist who devised the theoretical interpretation of nuclear fission. Meitner earned her PhD at the University of Vienna in 1905. In 1907 she and chemist Otto Hahn began a three-decade-long collaboration on the study of radioactivity, which led to many important discoveries. In their laboratory at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin, they discovered the isotope protactinium, studied nuclear beta decay, and investigated the products of neutron bombardment of uranium. Because of her Jewish heritage, Meitner was forced to flee Nazi Germany in 1938 and seek sanctuary in Sweden. There, she continued her research and maintained contact with Hahn through correspondence. With her nephew Otto Frisch, also a physicist, Meitner studied the physical details of the uranium neutron bombardment experiments that Hahn and Fritz Strassmann continued to perform. In 1939 Meitner and Frisch wrote a seminal paper on the theoretical aspects of the process , proposing that an atom’s nucleus can be split, adopting the term “fission,” and calculating the amount of energy that would be released. However, when it came time to award the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of nuclear fission, Otto Hahn alone received the honor . Meitner went on to receive many other honors and awards, including the German Physical Society’s Max Planck Medal in 1949 and the Enrico Fermi Award in 1966. She died in 1968 , just shy of her 90th birthday. (Photo credit: AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives)

Date in History: 7 November 1878