The Atomic Lady

Albert Einstein called her “our Marie Curie.” But while her discoveries provided the experimental underpinnings for nuclear fission, and eventually spawned the race between Hitler’s Germany and the United States to make an atom bomb, few outside the physics world know her name.

Lisa Meitner was born in 1878 to a secular middle class Jewish family in Vienna. She became only the second woman to earn a doctorate in physics from the University of Vienna, then moved to Berlin where she began her revolutionary collaboration with German chemist Otto Hahn at the prestigious Kaiser Wilhelm Institute.

Meitner was baptized a Protestant at age 30. Judaism, says Ruth Lewin Sime, author of Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics, “seemed, to her family, the old way.” But when the Nazis came to power, neither her conversion nor her prominence in the world of science could change the fact that she had been born a Jew.

She contemplated emigrating in 1933, but found her work at the Institute so engrossing that she couldn’t bear to give it up. “It was not only stupid but also very wrong that I did not leave at once,” she would later say. After Germany annexed Austria in 1938 and she was denied a German passport, Meitner packed a few things, took a train west and slipped across the Dutch border, eventually settling in Sweden.

In 1939, working with her nephew, physicist Otto Robert Frisch, and corresponding with Hahn, Meitner made her greatest scientific discovery. Hahn and his colleagues had bombarded uranium atoms and found the results to be chemically lighter than the original targets. Meitner and Frisch demonstrated that the nucleus of an atom could be split into two atoms, the combined mass of which was less than the original. As Einstein had theorized with the equation e=mc2, the loss in mass was converted to energy, the release of which was the key to the atom bomb.

No one can be certain why Hahn’s scientific papers omitted Meitner’s name and her crucial role in the project. Perhaps Hahn felt it necessary to avoid mentioning that he was collaborating with an exiled “Jew,” or perhaps he wanted the glory for himself. Whatever the reason, Meitner and Hahn remained friends, though Meitner was strident in her criticism of him and her former colleagues for not standing up to Hitler. “You all worked for Nazi Germany,” she wrote to Hahn. “And you tried to offer only passive resistance.”

In 1944, Hahn received a Nobel Prize for his work on nuclear fission. After the war, Meitner was recommended for a Nobel 40 times but was passed over. Some speculate it was because Hahn had already been honored for the work while others believe it was a classic case of sexism.

In 1978—on the 100th anniversary of her birth and a decade after her death—Austria issued a postage stamp in her honor. A more fitting tribute to her is found in the periodic table: Element 109, one of the offshoots of uranium made possible by the fission process, bears the name meitnerium.—Boris Weintraub