Lise Meitner

<p>Elise Meitner was born on November 7, 1878, in Vienna, Austria, into an enlightened Jewish intellectual family. Excluded from Austrian public high schools due to her gender, she studied privately, passing her university entrance exam and enrolling at the University of Vienna in 1901. Inspired by the brilliant theoretical physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, Meitner earned her doctorate in physics in 1906, becoming only the second woman to receive a physics PhD at Vienna.</p><p>In 1907, Meitner moved to Berlin to attend lectures by Max Planck. She began a thirty-year scientific partnership with chemist Otto Hahn at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry. Initially forced to work in an unheated basement carpenter's shop without access to university laboratories or a salary because of her gender, her experimental brilliance quickly became indispensable. In 1917, Meitner and Hahn discovered protactinium-231. By 1926, Meitner became the first woman in Germany to hold a full professorship in physics at the University of Berlin.</p><p>Following Hitler's rise and the 1938 annexation of Austria, Meitner's Jewish heritage placed her life in mortal danger. With the assistance of Dutch physicists, she fled Nazi Germany on a train to the Netherlands and settled in Stockholm, Sweden. In December 1938, Hahn wrote to Meitner in exile reporting baffling chemical results: bombarding uranium with neutrons produced barium. Walking in the snow at Kungälv with her nephew Otto Frisch, Meitner applied Bohr's liquid-drop model of the nucleus and Einstein's E=mc² to theoretically calculate that the uranium nucleus had split in half, releasing 200 million electron volts of energy. Frisch and Meitner coined the term <em>nuclear fission</em>. When Hahn was controversially awarded the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry alone, Meitner was unjustly excluded by the Nobel Committee. Refusing to participate in the Manhattan Project, she spent her final decades advocating for international arms control and peaceful atomic science. Her epitaph in Cambridge reads: 'A physicist who never lost her humanity.'</p>