Lise meitner: the nobel mistake
By: Zoe Herman
In 1944, Lise Meitner was stripped from the prize she justly deserved for discovering nuclear fission and serves as a prime example of the inequalities women in STEM are subject to. Meitner was the second woman to earn a doctorate degree at the University of Vienna. She was born in 1878 and in 1905 earned her degree in physics. She made many extraordinary discoveries but her work was never recognized. Women represent a very small percentage of people in STEM and receive significantly less money than their male counterparts. Luckily, we can see vast improvements today from ten, fifty, or a hundred years ago, when the situation for women in STEM was much worse.
In 1906, Meitner met Otto Hahn, who had earned a doctorate degree in chemistry at the University of Marburg in Germany. Hahn was looking for a partner with whom he could study radioactivity, and the two teamed up. At the time, the University of Vienna did not officially accept women, so they had to work in a remodeled carpenter’s shop instead. Later, women worked in the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. In 1938, Meitner was forced to leave Berlin because of her Jewish heritage and moved with Hahn to Stockholm to continue her work. Tucked away in their quaint city workshop, they discovered nuclear fission, the process by which larger atoms split into smaller ones. It was already known that the higher the charge of the nucleus of an atom, the weaker the surface tension of the atomic nucleus. Uranium, with a charge of 92+, had an atomic surface tension close to zero. Meitner hypothesized that with a surface tension so low, the nucleus could be hit by a neutron, a subatomic particle, and be split in half. Other scientists believed that when uranium was hit by neutrons, the nucleus captured the neutrons, which became positively charged, and the atom then became a different, larger element. Scientists believed that after being struck by protons, uranium would become radium. Meitner proved them wrong by finding that the element that appeared as a result of being hit by neutrons wasn’t the larger element radium, but the smaller one barium. Barium could only be produced by the splitting of uranium, being of a smaller size. Meitner encouraged her partner, Hahn, to explore this, and he later agreed with her theory. The exceptional discovery of nuclear fission led to the discovery of nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants.
When Hahn published his paper on the topic, he realized that including a Jewish woman’s name would destroy his career and delegitimize his work, so he chose to claim the discovery as his own. When Hahn wrote his paper, he could not fully explain Meitner’s discoveries since he was not specialized in physics. Meitner then wrote a letter to the editor clarifying the mechanics behind “Hahn’s discovery.” Despite this letter, in 1944, Hahn alone received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for the discovery of nuclear fission. Meitner was ignored due to the fact that she was both a Jew hiding in Sweden during the Nazi rule in Germany and a woman. This was neither the first nor the last example of the Nobel committee’s racism and sexism and has long lasting effects. Today, if you were to ask young children who Otto Hahn was, they would likely recognize the name. If you were to ask them who Lise Meitner was, they would probably answer with blank stares. It is time for her story to be brought to light and her name to be honored.