THE NEW YORK TIMES LIFE/STYLE In Oppenheimer, the blockbuster film about the construction of the atomic bomb, there is a memorable scene in which Luis Alvarez, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, reads a newspaper while blowing his hair can be cut. Suddenly Alvarez jumps out of his chair and runs down the street to find his colleague, the theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Dr. Meitner and Otto Hahn in a Berlin laboratory at the beginning of the 20th century. Photo: The New York Times/Archive
“Oppie! Oppie! He shouts. “They did it. Hahn and Strassmann in Germany. They split the uranium nucleus. They split the atom.”
The reference refers to two German chemists, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, who unknowingly reported a demonstration of nuclear fission, the splitting of an atom into lighter elements, in 1939. The discovery was of fundamental importance for the Manhattan Projectthe top secret American attempt, led by Oppenheimer, to develop the first nuclear weapons.
However, the scene is not entirely accurate, much to the chagrin of some scientists. An important actor is missing from the portrait: Lise Meitnera physicist who worked closely with Hahn and developed the theory of nuclear fission.
Meitner was a giant herself, a contemporary of the world Nobel as Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr It is Max Planck. After the second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, the American press dubbed her the “mother of the atomic bomb,” an association she vehemently rejected.
Only Hahn received the Nobel Prize for nuclear fission. In his acceptance speech, he referred to Meitner with a German term that means “assistant” or “collaborator,” according to Marissa Moss, author of a recent book about Meitner. “Or at best a colleague,” she said.
In 2022, Moss searched Meitner’s archives at the University of Cambridge. Since then, she has translated hundreds of letters written in German between Meitner and Hahn, which she says offer a more nuanced perspective on the end of their relationship. This perception also calls into question the popular idea that Meitner accepted the Nobel Prize result without resentment.
According to Moss, the snub was more than just a gender issue. “It’s easy to say she didn’t get the award because she was a woman,” Moss said. “Nobody thinks a woman would cause a fuss.” Moss also believes Meitner’s ancestry played a role: “This is a case where the motive was that she was Jewish.”
In 1947, Meitner wrote to her nephew Otto Robert Frisch, a Jewish physicist who also contributed to the discovery of nuclear fission: “I know that his attitude contributed to the Nobel Committee deciding against us,” she said of Hahn in a translated letter by Moss. “But this is something purely private that we don’t want to make public.”
Nobel Week is a time when the scientific community celebrates its greatest achievements but also increasingly addresses failures and injustices. Lise Meitner is one of many women in science who have not received due recognition for their work, including perhaps most notably Rosalind Franklin, the chemist who helped discover the double helix structure of DNA in 1953.
“There are hundreds, if not thousands, of women who have achieved great things in science and have simply gone unrecognized throughout their lives,” said Katie Hafner, host of the “Lost Women of Science” podcast. Hafner recently completed a twopart episode about Meitner, the second part of which begins with the fateful Oppenheimer scene. In contrast to other characters in her podcast, Hafner said: “Lise Meitner is not forgotten.”
But she added: “She is misunderstood.”
From the start, Meitner broke through glass ceilings. Born in Vienna in 1878, she began studying physics privately, as women in Austria were not allowed to attend college until 1897. In 1901 she enrolled at the University of Vienna for graduate studies; Five years later, she became the second woman to receive a doctorate in physics from her university.
Meitner spent the rest of his career working among the greats. She moved to the University of Berlin and began attending courses taught by Planck, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918 and who generally did not allow women to take his courses.
In 1938, Germany invaded Austria and Meitner was fully exposed to the Nazi regime. She decided to escape. Bohr, a Nobel Prize winner in physics, helped her escape by train.
In the end, Meitner went to Sweden, devastated that she had left her life’s work behind her and worried about her family’s safety.
She continued to work with Hahn by post. He conducted experiments and she interpreted results that he did not understand. One result surprised both of them: When uranium atoms were bombarded with neutrons, the neutron should have been absorbed and an electron released, which would have created a heavier element. Instead, Hahn found barium, a much lighter element. They were at a loss.
The discovery was beyond Hahn’s expertise as a chemist. “Perhaps you can think of a fantastic explanation,” he wrote in a letter to Meitner, translated by Ruth Lewin Sime, a chemist at Sacramento City College who published a biography of Meitner in 1996. “If you can suggest anything you could publish, then in a sense it would still be the work of the three of us!”
Hahn and his colleague Strassmann submitted the results for publication in December 1938. Her tone was uncertain. “Perhaps there are a number of unusual coincidences that have given us false clues,” they wrote in German.
Meitner was neither listed as the author nor was her contribution to the work mentioned.
In Sweden, Meitner reflected on the results with Frisch, her nephew, a physicist. One snowy day, Frisch recalls in his memoirs, they took a walk, sat on a tree trunk and scribbled calculations on pieces of paper.
They realized that uranium was extremely unstable and would likely shatter upon impact with, for example, a neutron. These fragments would be violently destroyed. If one of those pieces were barium, Meitner reasoned, the other would have to be another light element called krypton. She calculated the energy that would cause the explosion using Einstein’s famous equation: E = mc².
Hahn and Strassmann had split the atom.
“We have read and analyzed your work very carefully,” Meitner wrote to Hahn in January 1939. “Perhaps it is energetically possible for such a heavy core to burst.” In a later letter, she expressed her disappointment at her absence: “Although I am here emptyhanded, I am happy about these wonderful discoveries.”
Meitner and Frisch published their theoretical interpretation of Hahn and Strassmann’s results in the February 1939 issue of Nature. Frisch and Meitner designed experiments to test their hypotheses. In the following weeks, they published two more papers with the results that became the first physical confirmation of what Frisch called “nuclear fission.”
Later that year, Germany invaded Poland. The Second World War had begun. And the race to build an atomic bomb was on.
The news of nuclear fission spread. Although a single split atom would not produce enough energy for possible use in a weapon, some speculated that a chain reaction could solve the problem. The bombardment of uranium with neutrons not only created lighter elements; it also produced more neutrons. If these neutrons collided with more uranium, the reaction could stop.
To develop such a weapon, the US government launched the Manhattan Project. Many of Meitner’s colleagues, including Frisch and Bohr, became involved. Einstein did not do this, although he wrote a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt urging him to secure uranium and fund chain reaction experiments.
Although Meitner was invited, he declined to participate. (“I want nothing to do with a bomb!” she famously said.) In 1945, after atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, leading to the end of the war, some newspaper reports claimed that Meitner had smuggled that Recipe for the weapon from Nazi Germany in his pocket. She denied it. “You know a lot more about the atomic bomb in America than I do,” she told the New York Times in 1946.
In 1945 Hahn was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1944, a year too late due to the discovery of nuclear fission. Meitner and Frisch were also nominated for this year’s physics prize. But only Hahn won. / TRANSLATION LÍVIA BUELONI GONÇALVES
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