She worked out how the atom splits, on a walk in the Swedish snow. The Nobel Prize went to someone else.
In December 1938, a letter reached Kungälv, a small town on Sweden's west coast. Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner's partner of three decades, had fired neutrons at uranium in Berlin and found barium, an element only about half its mass. He couldn't explain it. Meitner, sixty years old and five months a refugee, went walking in the snow with her nephew Otto Frisch. Sitting on a tree trunk, they worked out the numbers on scraps of paper. The uranium nucleus had split in two and released about 200 million electron-volts. Nobody had seen anything like it.
They called it fission. Hahn received the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for it, alone. Meitner was nominated 49 times and never won. She refused to help build the bomb her physics made possible, and she lived to see a chemical element named after her.
Vienna, Berlin, Stockholm, Cambridge
The lifeline
1878
Born in Vienna's Leopoldstadt, the third of eight children
1906
Doctorate in physics, only the second woman to earn one at Vienna
1907
Goes to Berlin and joins Otto Hahn in a basement woodworking shop
1938
Flees Nazi Germany in July with 10 marks in her purse
1939
Meitner and Frisch explain nuclear fission in Nature
1968
Dies in Cambridge, England, on 27 October, aged 89
By the numbers
The measure of her
49
Nobel nominations, 19 in chemistry and 30 in physics. She never won.
10 marks
All the money she had when she crossed into the Netherlands in 1938
~200 MeV
The energy she calculated one splitting uranium nucleus releases
31
Years she worked in Berlin, 1907–1938, much of it beside Hahn
What she gave physics
The work
1907
A thirty-year partnership with Otto Hahn. He was the chemist and she was the physicist. For years she worked without pay, and she was not allowed past the basement of Emil Fischer's institute.
1918
Protactinium-231. Meitner and Hahn found a long-lived form of element 91. She did much of the work herself while he was away at war.
1922
The electron cascade later named for someone else. She described the radiationless emission of atomic electrons a year before Pierre Auger reported it independently. Physics calls it the Auger effect.
1926
Germany's first woman professor of physics, at the University of Berlin. In 1933 the Nazi regime took away her right to teach.
1934–38
The uranium programme. She persuaded Hahn to join her in bombarding uranium with neutrons, and Fritz Strassmann joined them. She led the physics until she was forced to flee.
1939
Fission explained. Her note with Frisch, published in Nature on 11 February, gave the first physical account of a nucleus splitting in two and of the energy it releases.
Written out, then written in
Recognition
In her lifetime
Unpaid "guest" for her first years in Berlin
At first barred from the institute beyond Hahn's basement workshop
Stripped of her teaching rights in 1933 and driven into exile in 1938
Left out of Hahn's 1944 Nobel Prize for the discovery of fission
Nominated 49 times, from 1924 to 1967, and never chosen
Since
Element 109, meitnerium, named for her in 1997
U.S. Enrico Fermi Award, 1966, shared with Hahn and Strassmann
Named "Woman of the Year" by the U.S. National Press Club, 1946
The European Physical Society's Lise Meitner Prize honours nuclear science in her name
The city that made her
Vienna
She grew up in a Jewish family in Leopoldstadt, at a time when Austrian girls' schooling ended at fourteen. The University of Vienna began admitting women in 1897. Meitner studied privately for the university entrance exam, enrolled in 1901 and learned physics from Ludwig Boltzmann, whose lectures she remembered all her life. Vienna gave her physics. Berlin gave her a laboratory, and then took everything back.
1897
Year the University of Vienna first admitted women
22
Her age when she finally enrolled there, in 1901
2nd
Woman to earn a physics doctorate at Vienna, in 1906
"I will have nothing to do with a bomb!"
— Lise Meitner, declining to work on the Manhattan Project
