Nuclear fission—a woman slighted by the Nobel Prize committee

Today (Dec. 17) in 1938 German chemist Otto Hahn did an experiment of bombarding uranium nuclei with neutrons in Berlin, splitting the nuclei of uranium into barium element, thus nuclear fission.  What the newspaper said was correct, but that was not the whole story—a story of a woman scientist that was slighted by the Nobel Prize committee.  Otto Hahn alone was awarded Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1944.

Otto Hahn (a chemist) and Lise Meitner (a physicist) worked together in the field of radioactivity and nuclear physic for thirty some years until 1938 when she (Jewish) had to escape in a hurry to Sweden.  Otto Hahn gave her a ring from his mother to be used to bribe the border guard.

After doing the experiment Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann couldn’t figure out what had happened.  Otto Hahn sent a letter to Lise Meitner in Sweden.  It was Christmas day in 1938 Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch (her nephew, also a nuclear physicist) figured it out that it was indeed a nuclear fission, she also calculated the enormous energy released by the neutron from this process, thus making the atomic bomb possible.


Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn in the basement of the Chemical Institute of the University of Berlin in 1909 (photo is from Alan Lightman’s The Discoveries)

In fact, Meitner and Hahn met in secret in Copenhagen on November 13, 1938, about a month before the experiment, to discuss the proposed experiment.

Lise Meitner said after the war that before the war “one could love one’s work and not always be tormented by the fear of the ghastly and malevolent things that people might do with beautiful scientific findings.”