Physicist — Lise Meitner (Vienna, 1878 – Cambridge, 1968) was an Austrian physicist of Jewish origin, naturalised Swedish, among the leading figures of twentieth-century nuclear physics. She worked for decades in Berlin in close collaboration with the chemist Otto Hahn, studying radioactivity and the products of neutron bombardment of nuclei. Forced to flee Nazi Germany in 1938, it was she, together with her nephew Otto Frisch, who provided in 1939 the correct theoretical interpretation of Hahn’s experiments, recognising and explaining the phenomenon of nuclear fission, whose name she coined. Her interpretation, based on the liquid-drop model of the nucleus, showed how a heavy nucleus could split apart, releasing huge amounts of energy. Despite her decisive role, the 1944 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Hahn alone, in one of the most debated cases of overlooked recognition in the history of science.
Trivia
Chemical element number 109, meitnerium (Mt), was named in her honour; her exclusion from the 1944 Nobel Prize is now considered one of the most glaring injustices in science, so much so that it is referred to as the “Nobel error”.
Theories and contributions
- Nuclear fission — A heavy nucleus, struck by a neutron, splits into lighter nuclei, releasing energy according to .
- Liquid-drop interpretation of the nucleus — The nucleus behaves like a drop of liquid that can deform and split, explaining the mechanism of fission.
Featured in chapters
Linked atoms
1 linked atoms.