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Elise "Lise" Meitner was an Austrian and Swedish nuclear physicist who was instrumental in the discovery of nuclear fission.
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science · Austrian-Swedish nuclear physicist (1878–1968) · nuclear physicist · university teacher · chemist · physicist · also Lise Meitner, Elise Meitner, Meitner
Born November 1878 · Died 27 October 1968 · Q56189
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De-Lise Meitner
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Surely Hahn fully deserved the Nobel Prize for chemistry. There is really no doubt about it. But I believe that Frisch and I contributed something not insignificant to the clarification of the process of uranium fission—how it originates and that it produces so much energy and that was something very remote to Hahn.
Awarded Austrian Decoration for Science and Art (1967).
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“Surely Hahn fully deserved the Nobel Prize for chemistry. There is really no doubt about it. But I believe that Frisch and I contributed something not insignificant to the clarification of the process of uranium fission—how it originates and that it produces so much energy and that was something very remote to Hahn.”
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Yahoo: Lise Meitner – the forgotten woman of nuclear physics who deserved a Nobel Prize
Acsh.org: Great Women of Science: Lisë Meitner – The Physicist Who Should Have Won the Nobel Prize
Business Insider: Lise Meitner helped discover nuclear fission but never won a Nobel Prize for her brilliance despite 49 nominations
iaea.org: Meet the Lise Meitner Programme visiting professionals
Physics World: Overlooked for the Nobel: Lise Meitner
The Daily Beast: Lise Meitner Helped Discover Nuclear Fission—and Was Then Forgotten
Max Planck Society: Lise Meitner Excellence Program
RealClearScience: Lise Meitner's Devastating Letter to Otto Hahn
The Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy in the United States named a major nuclear energy research program after her
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The Institute of Physics in the UK established the Meitner Medal for public engagement within physics
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JSTOR Daily: Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics
The "Gothenburg Lise Meitner Award" was established by the University of Gothenburg and Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden; it is awarded annually to a scientist who has made a breakthrough in physics
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The European Physical Society established the biennial Lise Meitner Prize for excellent research in nuclear science
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Element 109 was named meitnerium
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By Ruth Lewin Sime took advantage of this unsealing to reconsider Meitner's exclusion
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Died 1968-10-27.
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Meitner received many naming honours
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Awarded Austrian Decoration for Science and Art (1967).
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Meitner made a partial recovery, but was eventually weakened to the point where she had to move into a Cambridge nursing home
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Awarded Enrico Fermi Award (1966).
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Led to Meitner having a heart attack, which she spent several months recovering from
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Won Wilhelm Exner Medal (1960).
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And moved to the UK where many of her relatives were
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Awarded Honorary doctor of the Free University of Berlin (1957).
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Clyde Cowan and Frederick Reines did just that
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Awarded Foreign Member of the Royal Society (1955).
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Awarded Otto Hahn Prize for Chemistry and Physics (1955).
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The Wilhelm Exner Medal in 1960, and in 1967, the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art
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And 1951, she applied magic numbers to nuclear fission
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Won Max Planck Medal (1949).
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Became a Swedish citizen, but without surrendering her Austrian citizenship thanks to a special act passed by the Riksdag
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While insisting on keeping her Austrian citizenship, but relocated to Britain in the 1950s to be with family members
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And then moved to Cambridge to join Otto Robert Frisch
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Awarded Prize of the City of Vienna for Natural Sciences (1947).
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With Eklund as the project director, and Meitner worked with him on its design and construction
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Meitner moved to the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, where Gudmund Borelius established a new facility for atomic research
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Received the honour "Woman of the Year" from the National Press Club and had dinner with the President of the United States, Harry S
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But Borelius and Klein ensured that she had the salary of a professor, if not the title
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The Nobel Committee for Chemistry in Sweden that selected the Nobel Prize in Chemistry decided to award that prize solely to Hahn, who found out from a newspaper while detained in Farm Hall in England
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And a full member in 1951, permitting her to participate in the Nobel Prize process
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Frisch and Rudolf Peierls produced the Frisch–Peierls memorandum, which established that an atomic explosion could be generated
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Accepted an invitation from Eva von Bahr to spend it with her family at Kungälv, and Meitner asked Frisch to join her there
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Because of the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws of Nazi Germany, as well as her citizenship after the 1938 annexation of Austria by Germany
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Irène Curie and Frédéric Joliot irradiated aluminium foil with alpha particles, and found that this results in a short-lived radioactive isotope of phosphorus
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Meitner taught a seminar on "Questions of Atomic Physics and Atomic Chemistry" with Leó Szilárd
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Wolfgang Pauli wrote an open letter to Meitner and Hans Geiger in which he proposed that the continuous spectrum was caused by the emission of a second particle during beta decay, one that had no electric charge and litt
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Charles Drummond Ellis and William Alfred Wooster measured the energy of the continuous spectrum produced by the beta decay of bismuth-210 at 0
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Career landmark: professor (1926–1938).
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Became an außerordentlicher Professor ('extraordinary professor'), the first woman university physics professor in Germany
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Awarded Lieben Prize (1925).
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Won Silver Leibniz medal (1924).
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The Lieben Prize from the Austrian Academy of Sciences in 1925, the Ellen Richards Prize in 1928, the City of Vienna Prize for science in 1947, Max Planck Medal of the German Physical Society jointly with Hahn in 1949, t
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Meitner accepted an invitation from Manne Siegbahn to come to Sweden and give a series of lectures on radioactivity as a visiting professor at Lund University
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And in 1922 Meitner was granted her habilitation and became a Privatdozentin
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Hahn and most of the students, laboratory assistants and technicians had been called up to serve in the armed forces, so Meitner had to do everything herself
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James Chadwick found that electrons emitted from the nucleus formed a continuous spectrum, but Meitner found this hard to believe, as it seemed to contradict quantum physics, which held that electrons in an atom can only
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Hahn and Meitner had developed a new technique for separating the tantalum group from pitchblende, which they hoped would speed the isolation of the new isotope
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Meitner was offered an academic position in Prague, which was then part of her country of Austria-Hungary
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And named it brevium after its short half-life
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Hahn and Meitner moved to the newly founded Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (KWI) for Chemistry in Berlin
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Meitner became the second woman to earn a doctorate in physics from the University of Vienna
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Studied at University of Vienna, doctorate (1901–1906).
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While engaged in this research, Meitner was introduced by Stefan Meyer to radioactivity, then a very new field of study
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Could be a new way of detecting radioactive substances
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Studied at Akademisches Gymnasium (1901).
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Cramming the missing years of secondary education into two
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And shared Meitner's love of music
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Born 1878-11.
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