Traces the life of a Jewish physicist who had to flee Nazi Germany, codiscovered nuclear fission with Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, but was denied recognition when the work received a Nobel Prize
When sixty-year-old Lise Meitner fled Nazi Germany in 1938, she carried with her nothing but a small valise and a deep, abiding passion for physics. Eight years later Meitner, co-discoverer with Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann of nuclear fission, watched as Hahn alone received the Nobel Prize for their joint research. In telling the dramatic personal story of this extraordinary woman, Ruth Sime's definitive biography illuminates the scientific and social progress and the injustice and destruction that have marked the twentieth century.
As a shy young woman from Vienna, Lise Meitner braved the institutional sexism of the scientific world to make a place for herself at the prestigious Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin. She became prominent in the international physics community and was a pioneer of nuclear physics. Her career spanned the development of atomic physics from the early years of radioactivity to the brink of the nuclear age. She refused to participate in the Allied atomic bomb project and was greatly concerned about the development of nuclear weapons after the war.
Using the huge collection of Meitner's personal papers, correspondence and interviews with her contemporaries and friends, and a wealth of largely unpublished archival material, Sime lets us hear the voice of the scientist and the woman. Among Meitner's teachers, colleagues, and friends were many of the great physicists of all time - Boltzmann, Planck, Rutherford, Bohr, Einstein, Fermi, Franck, Pauli, von Laue, and others. Her unusual collegiality and friendship with Otto Hahn, which survived the early years of the Third Reich, was later broken and betrayed. In her letters and papers, Meitner speaks about science, the rise of Nazism, the Holocaust, the unhappiness of her Swedish exile, her exclusion from the Nobel Prize, and the postwar German mentality that all but destroyed her scientific reputation.
Based on Meitner's personal papers, correspondence, and interviews with her contemporaries and friends, this volume depicts the extraordinary life of pioneer nuclear physicist Lise Meitner (1878-1968) who fled Nazi Germany in 1938 and, while in exile, saw a colleague receive the Nobel Prize for a project on which she and another physicist had jointly worked. B&w photographs. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.
"Deprived of the Nobel Prize she so clearly deserved for her contribution to the discovery of nuclear fission, Lise Meitner has never been given the attention she deserves in the history of twentieth-century physics. Now, with grace, style, and great authority, Ruth Sime sets the record straight."--Susan Quinn, author of Marie Curie: A Life
Lise Meitner (1878-1968) was a pioneer of nuclear physics and co-discoverer, with Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, of nuclear fission. Braving the sexism of the scientific world, she joined the prestigious Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry and became a prominent member of the international physics community. Of Jewish origin, Meitner fled Nazi Germany for Stockholm in 1938 and later moved to Cambridge, England. Her career was shattered when she fled Germany, and her scientific reputation was damaged when Hahn took full credit—and the 1944 Nobel Prize—for the work they had done together on nuclear fission. Ruth Sime's absorbing book is the definitive biography of Lise Meitner, the story of a brilliant woman whose extraordinary life illustrates not only the dramatic scientific progress but also the injustice and destruction that have marked the twentieth century.
