October 27: Lise Meitner

An Austrian physicist who helped discover uranium fission but refused to work on the atomic bomb, Lise Meitner died in Cambridge on this date in 1968. Meitner was the second woman to gain a doctoral degree in physics from the University of Vienna (1905). She then became an assistant to Max Planck (who had formerly not even permitted women to attend his lectures) in Berlin. In 1926, Meitner became the first woman in Germany to become a full professor in physics, at the University of Berlin, where she co-discovered (with Otto Hahn) nuclear fission and was described by Albert Einstein as “the German Marie Curie.” In 1945, Hahn received a Nobel Prize for his share in the work, while Meitner’s contribution was ignored. She fled Nazi Germany in 1938, bribing her way out of the country, and took refuge in Sweden, where she continued her work on nuclear fission. Meitner was one of the first scientists to recognize that the explosive potential of atom-splitting was in the hands of German scientists, a realization that led Albert Einstein, among others, to petition U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt to develop an American bomb. Meitner, however, refused a position at the Los Alamos Manhattan Project, declaring, “I will have nothing to do with a bomb!” Element 109 was named meitnerium in her honour, as are craters on the moon and on Venus.
To Hahn, after the war, she wrote: “You all worked for Nazi Germany. And you tried to offer only a passive resistance. Certainly, to buy off your conscience you helped here and there a persecuted person, but millions of innocent human beings were allowed to be murdered without any kind of protest being uttered ... [it is said that] first you betrayed your friends, then your children in that you let them stake their lives on a criminal war – and finally that you betrayed Germany itself, because when the war was already quite hopeless, you did not once arm yourselves against the senseless destruction of Germany.” —Lise Meitner