Lise Meitner with Otto Hahn. © 2016 Atomic Heritage Foundation

Growing up in Austria

“life need not be easy provided only it was not empty” – Lise Meitner (Sime, 2002)

For Lise Meitner, life was not empty. She struggled through being female in a male dominated world, being exiled, and being controversially excluded from a Nobel Prize, but she pursued her love of science and has a lengthy, honorable career to show for it. Information regarding her personal life is not found in any autobiography or biography during her lifetime (Sime, 2002). She was a private person whose secrets have been unraveled through personal diary entries and letters.

Meitner was born in Vienna, Austria in 1878 to a lawyer named Phillip Meitner and his wife Hedwig. Together they had seven children, Lise being the third. It was unusual for the time, but all of their children received some form of higher education. Lise commented on the intellectual environment her parents surrounded themselves with and developed a passion for the pursuit of knowledge.

She was of Jewish heritage, but religion was never emphasized and all of her siblings and herself were eventually baptized into different denominations of the Christian faith as adults. This rejection of Jewish heritage did not stop the growing anti-semetic attitudes of Germany which would ultimately play a huge role in Meitner’s life (Sime, 2002).

Education

After Meitner reached the highest level of public education, she was faced with the choice of whether or not to become a teacher, one of the only socially acceptable female occupations. She had no interest in teaching due to her love of mathematics and physics, but opportunities were scarce and only wealthy families could afford to send their daughters to Switzerland where women were allowed entrance to university . She reluctantly enrolled in Seminar, or teacher training. Austria opened its educational doors to women in 1897, so Meitner finished her schooling to become a teacher and in 1899 began private lessons to prepare her for university (Sime, 1996, p. 8-9).

After being one of the few females to pass the entrance exam, Lise Meitner began studying at the University of Vienna in 1901 (Sime, 2002). During her first year she filled her schedule with math, physics, calculus, and chemistry and ultimately decided against pursuing mathematics. Instead she discovered a fondness for experimenting in physics. She was greatly inspired by lectures from theoretical physicist Ludwig Boltzmann and fondly remembers his classes as “the most beautiful and stimulating I have ever heard” (Sime, 1996, p. 10-13).

After University

Lise Meitner became the second woman in Vienna to earn her doctorate in physics in 1906. Her title was now Fraulein Doktor but her first job as a teacher in a girls’ school left her wanting. After working during the day she would go the the physics laboratory to learn radioactivity techniques and published several papers (Sime, 2002). When she was 29, she decided to go to Berlin with the blessing and financial backing of her father to study for a few terms. Germany instead became her home for 31 years (McGrayne, 2001, p. 42).

She studied under a reluctant Max Planck who did not necessarily agree to women in the university setting, with few exceptions (Sime, 1996, p.26). It was in Berlin where Meitner met chemist Otto Hahn and began a decades long collaboration and friendship. They both moved to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in 1912. Hahn started as a professor and Meitner a “guest” (Sime, 2002). She worked her way up to becoming a physics professor in 1926 which made her the first woman in Germany to do so (McGrayne, 2001 p42). During her many years in Berlin, Meitner worked with brilliant minds in both physics and chemistry. She was welcomed as a peer in groups of men in academia and often times was seen as a leader in physics.

Fleeing Germany

The Nazi takeover of Germany changed everything for Lise Meitner. She was greatly pressured to leave the country in 1933, but decided to stay. In March of 1938 Austria was annexed and she was no longer protected with her Austrian citizenship. Her out-of-country connections helped her to illegally leave Germany and she began living in exile in Sweden (Sime, 2002). Otto Hahn and Meitner wrote frequently about their exciting discoveries in nuclear physics and chemistry. Hahn was inadvertently splitting an atom into two nearly equal parts, but did not realize that was what was happening. He wrote Meitner, “perhaps you could come up with some sort of fantastic explanation . . . If there is anything you could propose that you could publish, it would still in a way be work by the three of us!” (p. 11). The three that is being referred to is Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner, and Fritz Strassmann a German chemist.

Discovering Nuclear Fission

With the help of Meitner’s nephew Otto Frisch, she discovered that Hahn was in fact splitting the atom; “together they devised the first theoretical explanation for a uranium nucleus splitting in two, calculated the energy released, pointed to the ‘transuranium’ elements as fission fragments, and proposed the term ‘nuclear fission’ which was instantly adopted” (Sime, 2002).

Otto Hahn received the Nobel Prize in chemistry for discovering nuclear fission in 1944 by himself much to the dismay of many scientists that knew of Lise Meitner’s contribution. In 1945 the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Meitner felt it unfortunate that the discovery of nuclear fissure occurred in a time of war (McGrayne, 2001, p. 61). Meitner did not comment much on the fact that she did not receive the Nobel Prize, she was more upset about Hahn’s silence on the atrocities being committed in Germany under Nazi rule (p. 62).

Lise Meitner was repeatedly nominated for the physics Nobel prize, but never won, she did win numerous other awards however, “including the Max Planck Medal, the Otto Hahn Prize (ironically), and just before she died, the Enrico Fermi Award in 1966 along with Frisch. Meitner also had the rare privilege of having an element named after her, meitnerium, although this occurred much later in 1997” (Maciel, 2015). Meitner died at the age of 89 in 1968 having made enormous contributions to physics should be an inspiration to any young girl or woman struggling to find her place in the world of science.