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Lisa Meitner November
7 1876, she was an
Austrian-born
She was born into a
Jewish family as the
third of eight children
in Vienna.
Her father, Philipp
Meitner, was one of
the first Jewish lawyers
in Austria.
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She shortened her name
from Elise to Lisa. The birth
register of Vienna's Jewish
community lists Meitner as
being born on 17
November 1878, but all
other documents list it as 7
November, which is what
she used.
As an adult, she converted
to Christianity, following
Protestantism and being
baptized in 1908.
With the support of her
parents, she was able to
obtain private higher
education
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Meitner studied physics
and became the second
woman to obtain a doctrol
degree in physics at the
University of Viennain 1905
Max Planck ( a German
physicist who actualized
the quantum physics,
initiating a revolution in
natural science and
philosophy )allowed her to
attend his lectures, an
unusual gesture by Planck,
who until then had
rejected any women
wanting to attend his
lectures. After one year,
Meitner became Planck's
assistant.
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During the first
years she worked
together with
chemist Otto Hahn
and discovered
with him several
new isotopes.
The
collaboration
continued for
30 years
In 1917 she and Hahn
discovered the first long-lived
isotope of the element
protactinium (is a chemical
element with the symbol Pa
and atomic number 91), for
which she was awarded the
Leibniz Medal by the Berlin
Academy of Sciences. That
year, she was given her own
physics section at the Kaiser
Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry.
 In 1922, she discovered the
cause, known as the Auger
effect, of the emission from
surfaces of electrons with
signature energies.
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She led several courses in
quantum physics with her
outstanding graduate
students (such as Leo Szilard
and Max Delbrueck) as
assistants, until Adolf Hitler’s
racist decrees in April, 1933
stripped Jewish academics of
their professorial positions
 she held her paid position at
the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for
Chemistry until the Third
Reich’s invasion of Austria in
1938 brought Austrians under
German law.
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Unknown to Lisa Meitner, her
escape route from Berlin was
orchestrated by the
international physics
community and Danish
physicist Niels Bohr. Her close
partner Otto Hahn was not
even notified of secret plans
by Nobel-laureate Bohr until
days before her departure in
July 1938. Dirk Coster, a Dutch
physicist, secretly
accompanied Meitner
through the stressful train
journey across Nazi borders
into the Netherlands. With the
assistance of Bohr, she
departed for Copenhagen
and then Sweden.
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she decided to cross Sweden by train to visit
her 29-year-old nephew Otto Robert Frisch.
Her correspondence with Hahn during
December 1938 demonstrates that she
continued to urge him and their assistant Fritz
Strassman in Berlin to continue research she
had instigated on uranium
Meitner and her nephew Frisch took a hike in
the snowy Swedish woods, animatedly
discussing the puzzling “bursting” process.
Then they realized: if E=mc2, that mass could
not be lost, but the nucleus would be “split in
two.”
The insight was so dramatic that Meitner
excitedly scribbled out the formulas on a
scrap of paper there in the woods, urging
Frisch to return to Copenhagen’s laboratories
and replicate the experiments.
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The irony of the story of Lise Meitner is
that her laboratory partner of thirty
years, Otto Hahn, who remained in
Berlin throughout the Third Reich, was
awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry
in 1944. Meitner’s exclusion from
sharing the Nobel Prize was integrally
related to her escape from Nazi
Germany to Sweden and the
consequent social ‘marginalization’ of
her important physics research and
discoveries
Albert Einstein called the
respected Viennese
pioneer in nuclear physics
“our Madame Curie.”
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After the war, Meitner, while
acknowledging her own moral failing in
staying in Germany from 1933 to 1938,
was bitterly critical of Hahn and other
German scientists who had
collaborated with the Nazis and done
nothing to protest against the crimes of
Hitler's regime.
Meitner became a Swedish citizen in
1949. She finally decided to retire in
1960 and then moved to the UK
where most of her relatives
. A strenuous trip to the United States
in 1964 led to Meitner having a heart
attack, which she spent several
months recovering from. Her
physical and mental condition
weakened by atherosclerosis (is a
condition in which an artery wall
thickens as a result of the
accumulation of fatty materials such as
cholesterol)
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After breaking her
hip in a fall and
suffering several
small strokes in 1967,
Meitner made a
partial recovery, but
eventually was
weakened to the
point where she
moved into a
Cambridge nursing
home
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She died on October 27 at the
age of 89. Meitner was not
informed of the deaths of Otto
Hahn and his wife Edith, as her
family believed it would be
too much for someone as frail
as her to handle.As was her
wish, she was buried in the
village of Bramley in
Hampshire, at St. James parish
church, close to her younger
brother Walter, who had died
in 1964. Her nephew Otto
Robert Frischcomposed the
inscription on her headstone. It
reads "Lise Meitner: a physicist
who never lost her humanity."
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Albert Einstein called the
respected Viennese
pioneer in nuclear
physics “our Madame
Curie.” (French chemist
(born in Poland) who
won two Nobel prizes;
one (with her husband
and Henri Becquerel) for
research on radioactivity
and another for her
discovery of radium and
polonium (1867-1934) )
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http://nuclearfiles.org/menu/l
ibrary/biographies/bio_meitn
er-lise.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li
se_Meitner
http://www.sdsc.edu/Scienc
eWomen/meitner.html
http://www.atomicarchive.c
om/Bios/Meitner.shtml
http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/
article/meitner-lise