Within the fall of 1946, a South African little lady aspiring to be a scientist wrote to Einstein and ended her letter with a self-conscious entreatment: “I hope you’ll not suppose any the much less of me for being a lady!” Einstein responded with phrases of assuring knowledge that resonate to today: “I don’t thoughts that you’re a lady, however the primary factor is that you just your self don’t thoughts. There isn’t any purpose for it.”

And but causes don’t all the time come from purpose. The historical past of science, just like the historical past of the world itself, is the historical past of unreasonable asymmetries of energy, the suppressive penalties of which have meant that the comparatively few ladies who rose to the highest of their respective subject did so because of inordinate brilliance and tenacity.

Among the many most excellent but under-celebrated of those pioneering ladies is the Austrian physicist Lise Meitner (November 7, 1878–October 27, 1968), who led the group that found nuclear fission however was excluded from the Nobel Prize for the invention, and whose story I first encountered in Alan Lightman’s illuminating 1990 ebook The Discoveries. This diminutive Jewish girl, who had barely saved her personal life from the Nazis, was heralded by Einstein because the Marie Curie of the German-speaking world. She is the topic of the superb biography Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics (public library) by chemist, science historian, and Guggenheim fellow Ruth Lewin Sime.

Meitner was born in Vienna a bit greater than a yr after pioneering astronomer Maria Mitchell, who paved the way in which for girls in science throughout the Atlantic, admonished the primary class of feminine astronomers: “No girl ought to say, ‘I’m however a girl!’ However a girl! What extra are you able to ask to be?” Though Meitner confirmed a present for arithmetic from an early age, there was little correlation between aptitude and alternative for girls in Nineteenth-century Europe. On the finish of her lengthy life, she would recount, not bitterly however wistfully:

Considering again to … the time of my youth, one realizes with some astonishment what number of issues then existed within the lives of unusual younger women, which now appear virtually unimaginable. Among the many most troublesome of those issues was the potential of regular mental coaching.

Sime herself, who spent many years as the one girl at her college division, captures the broader cultural necessity of telling Meitner’s story: “I used to be referred to as the girl the all-male chemistry division didn’t wish to rent; underneath such circumstances one turns into, and stays, a feminist.” She writes of Meitner’s Sisyphean rise to stature:

Her education in Vienna ended when she was fourteen, however just a few years later, the college admitted ladies, and she or he studied physics underneath the charismatic Ludwig Boltzmann. As a younger girl she went to Berlin with out the slightest prospects for a future in physics, however once more she was lucky, discovering a mentor and good friend in Max Planck and a collaborator in Otto Hahn, a chemist simply her age. Collectively Meitner and Hahn made names for themselves in radioactivity, after which within the Twenties Meitner went on, unbiased of Hahn, into nuclear physics, an rising subject through which she was a pioneer. Within the Berlin physics group she was, as Einstein appreciated to say, “our Marie Curie”; amongst physicists all over the place, she was considered one of many nice experimentalists of her day… The painfully shy younger girl had develop into an assertive professor — “brief, darkish, and bossy,” her nephew would tease — and though at instances she was haunted by the insecurity of her youth, she by no means doubted that physics was value it.

Meitner by no means married nor had kids and, so far as her private papers point out, by no means had a critical romance. However her life was a full one, warmed by deep human connection — she was an exceptionally devoted good friend and surrounded herself with folks she cherished, in Meitner’s personal phrases, as “nice and lovable personalities” who offered a “magic musical accompaniment” to her life. Above all, she was besotted with science — a lot in order that she patiently chipped away at and ultimately broke by means of each possible obstruction to pursuing her ardour.

Meitner performed her first scientific experiment as a bit lady — an software of purpose and important considering in an empirical defiance of superstition. Sime relays the emblematic incident:

As soon as, when Lise was nonetheless very younger, her grandmother warned her by no means to stitch on the Sabbath, or the heavens would come tumbling down. Lise was performing some embroidery on the time and determined to make a check. Inserting her needle on the embroidery, she caught simply the tip of it in and glanced anxiously on the sky, took a sew, waited once more, after which, happy that there can be no objections from above, contentedly went on together with her work. Together with books, summer season hikes, and music, a sure rational skepticism was a relentless of Lise’s childhood years.

Since her formal education had ended on the age of fourteen, Meitner spent just a few years repressing her scientific ambitions. However they burned in her with irrepressible ardor. Lastly, when Austrian universities started admitting ladies in 1901, she obtained her highschool certification on the age of twenty-three after compressing eight years’ value of logic, literature, arithmetic, Greek, Latin, botany, zoology, and physics into twenty months of examine to be able to take the examination that will qualify her for college. She acquired her Ph.D. in 1905, considered one of a handful of ladies on this planet to have achieved a doctorate in physics by that time.

However when 29-year-old Meitner traveled to Berlin, hoping to check with the nice Max Planck, she appeared to have entered a time machine — German universities nonetheless had their doorways firmly shut to ladies. She needed to ask for a particular permission to attend Planck’s lectures.

Within the fall of 1907, she met Otto Hahn — a German chemist 4 months her junior, as keen on radioactivity as she was, and unopposed to working with ladies. However ladies have been forbidden from getting into, a lot much less working at, Berlin’s Chemical Institute, so to be able to collaborate, Meitner and Hahn needed to work in a former carpentry store transformed right into a lab within the basement of the constructing. Hahn was allowed to climb up the flooring, however Meitner was not — a tough undeniable fact that fringes on metaphor.

The 2 scientists crammed one another’s gaps with their respective aptitudes — Meitner, skilled in physics, was an excellent mathematician who thought conceptually and will design extremely unique experiments to check her concepts; Hahn, skilled in chemistry, excelled at punctilious lab work. Over the thirty years they collaborated, Meitner and Hahn emerged as pioneers within the examine of radioactivity. Finally, Meitner gained independence from Hahn — she revealed fifty-six papers on her personal between 1921 and 1934.

However as her profession was taking off, the Nazis started usurping Europe. Meitner and Hahn’s third collaborator, a junior scientist named Fritz Strassmann, had already gotten in bother for refusing to affix Nazi organizations. In 1938, simply because the three scientists have been performing their most visionary experiments, Nazi troops marched into Austria. Meitner refused to cover her Jewish heritage. Her solely remaining choice was to depart, however the Nazis had already put anti-Semitic legal guidelines in place prohibiting college professors from exiting the nation. On July 13, with the assistance of Hahn and some different scientist buddies, Meitner made a slender escape throughout the Dutch border. From Holland, she migrated to Denmark, the place she stayed together with her good friend Niels Bohr. She lastly discovered a everlasting house on the Nobel Institute for Physics in Sweden. (Three centuries earlier, Descartes, supreme champion of purpose, had additionally fled to Sweden to keep away from the Inquisition after witnessing the trial of Galileo.)

That November, Hahn and Meitner met secretly in Copenhagen to debate some perplexing outcomes Hahn and Strassmann had obtained: After bombarding the nucleus of a uranium atom (atomic quantity 92) with a single neutron, they’d ended up with the nucleus of radium (atomic quantity 88), which acted chemically like barium (56), a component with near half the atomic weight of radium — a seemingly magical transmutation that didn’t make bodily sense. {That a} tiny neutron shifting at low pace would destabilize and downright shatter one thing as sturdy as an atom, pulling down its atomic quantity and altering its chemical conduct, appeared as mythic as David taking out Goliath with a slingshot.

At that time, Hahn was one of many world’s finest radiochemists and Meitner one of many world’s finest physicists. She informed him unequivocally that his chemical response made no sense on bodily grounds and urged him to repeat the experiment.

Meitner herself continued to ponder the perplexity. The epiphany arrived on Christmas day, throughout a stroll together with her nephew and collaborator, Otto Robert Frisch. In recounting the event in his memoir, Frisch would inadvertently present essentially the most excellent metaphor for a way ladies make progress in science relative to their male friends:

We walked up and down within the snow, I on skis and she or he on foot (she stated and proved that she may get alongside simply as quick that manner).

In making sense of the nonsensical outcomes, Meitner and Frisch got here up with what they might name nuclear fission — a phrase used for the very first time within the seventh paragraph of the paper they revealed the next month. The notion {that a} nucleus can break up and be reworked into one other ingredient was radical — nobody had fathomed it earlier than. Meitner had offered the primary understanding of how and why this occurred.

Nuclear fission would show to be one of the highly effective — and harmful — discoveries within the historical past of humanity, an influence that succumbed to our twin capacities for good and evil: It was central to the invention of the deadliest weapon in human historical past, the atomic bomb. In truth, later in life Meitner was cruelly known as “the Jewish mom of the atomic bomb,” though her discovery was purely scientific, it predated this malevolent software by a few years, and as soon as she noticed it put into follow to harmful ends, she adamantly refused to work on the bomb. She, like the remainder of the world, noticed the bomb as a grave turning level for humanity. Years later, she would subject a bittersweet lamentation for the period that ended with its invention:

One may love one’s work and never all the time be suffering from the worry of the ghastly and malevolent issues that individuals would possibly do with lovely scientific findings.

The invention of fission itself was a supreme instance of those lovely scientific findings — a triumph of the human mind over the mysteries of nature, in addition to a testomony to interpretation as a artistic act. The nonsensical empirical outcomes have been Hahn’s, however what extracted which means from them was Meitner’s interpretation — she had dis-covered, within the correct sense of uncovering one thing obscured from view, the underlying precept that made sense of the grand perplexity.

Hahn took her groundbreaking perception and ran with it, publishing the invention with out mentioning her identify. It’s inappropriate whether or not his causes have been private jealousies or the political cowardice of incensing the Nazi authorities — the purpose is that Meitner felt deeply betrayed by the injustice. She wrote to her brother Walter:

I’ve no self esteem… Hahn has simply revealed completely great issues based mostly on our work collectively … a lot as these outcomes make me glad for Hahn, each personally and scientifically, many individuals right here should suppose I contributed completely nothing to it — and now I’m so discouraged.

In 1944, the invention of nuclear fission was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry — to Hahn alone. Sime writes:

The distortion of actuality and the suppression of reminiscence are recurrent themes in any examine of Nazi Germany and its aftermath. By any regular customary of scientific attribution, there would have been little doubt about Meitner’s position within the discovery of fission. For it’s clear from the revealed report and from non-public correspondence that this was a discovery to which Meitner contributed from starting to finish — an inherently interdisciplinary discovery that will, with out query, have been acknowledged as such, have been it not for the artifact of Meitner’s compelled emigration. However nothing about this discovery was untouched by the politics of Germany in 1938. The identical racial insurance policies that drove Meitner out of Germany made it unimaginable for her to be a part of Hahn and Strassmann’s publication, and harmful for Hahn to acknowledge their persevering with ties. Just a few weeks after the invention was made, Hahn claimed it for chemistry alone; earlier than lengthy, he suppressed and denied not solely his hidden collaboration with a “non-Aryan” in exile however the worth of almost all the pieces she had achieved earlier than as properly. It was self-deception, introduced on by worry. Hahn’s dishonesty distorted the report of this discovery and virtually price Lise Meitner her place in its historical past.

Meitner acquired numerous accolades in her lifetime and even had a chemical ingredient, meitnerium, posthumously named after her, however the slight was by no means righted. Though each possible roadblock had been positioned earlier than her in pursuing a scientific training, she had survived Nazi persecution, and had endured the anguish of exile, she thought-about the Nobel omission that almost all irredeemable sorrow of her life.

Sime writes:

Apart from just a few transient statements, she didn’t marketing campaign on her personal behalf; she didn’t write an autobiography, nor did she authorize a biography throughout her lifetime. Solely seldom did she communicate of her battle for training and acceptance, though the insecurity and isolation of her childhood affected her deeply afterward. And he or she virtually by no means spoke of her compelled emigration, shattered profession, or damaged friendships. She would have most popular that the necessities of her life be gleaned from her scientific publications, however she knew that in her case that will not suffice.

[…]

Scientist that she was, she preserved her knowledge. Her wealthy assortment of non-public papers, along with archival materials from different sources, gives the premise for an in depth understanding of her work, her life, and the exceptionally troublesome interval through which she lived.

Sime considers the extra systemic implications of Meitner’s case:

To insist that Meitner contributed nothing to the fission discovery, to suggest that Meitner and Frisch had been given an unfair benefit — these have been methods of denying that she had been handled unjustly and, in a bigger sense, of refusing to confront the injustice and crimes of the Nazi interval. Quite than acknowledging that Meitner’s exclusion from fission was political, Hahn and his hangers-on invented spurious scientific causes for it. Arrogantly, and with misplaced nationwide pleasure, they denied the injustice, created new injustice — and implicated themselves.

Given the echo chamber of interpretive opinion we name historical past, Hahn’s view was readily echoed by his followers and, in flip, by generations of journalists and uncritical commentators on the historical past of science. The Nobel exclusion was the obvious, however the egregious erasure of Meitner’s legacy didn’t finish there. The fission equipment — the very instrument she had utilized in her Berlin laboratory to make her discoveries — was on show at Germany’s premiere science museum for thirty-five years with out a lot as mentioning her identify.

This, in fact, was removed from the final time {that a} girl was excluded from a Nobel Prize for a discovery she both made or made potential together with her important contribution: There may be, maybe most famously, Jocelyn Bell Burnell’s discovery of pulsars, to say nothing of Vera Rubin, whose affirmation of the existence of darkish matter furnished a serious leap in our understanding of the universe and but stays, many years later, bereft of a Nobel. However as physicist and novelist Janna Levin wrote in her wonderful NPR op-ed concerning the foibles of scientific acclaim, “scientists don’t commit their lives to the generally lonely, agonizing, toilsome investigation of an austere universe as a result of they need a prize.”

Meitner herself articulated the identical sentiment in a speech she gave in Vienna on the age of 75:

Science makes folks attain selflessly for fact and objectivity; it teaches folks to just accept actuality, with surprise and admiration, to not point out the deep pleasure and awe that the pure order of issues brings to the true scientist.

Meitner died peacefully in her sleep on October 27, 1968, days earlier than her ninetieth birthday. Otto Robert, considered one of her dearest buddies, selected the inscription for her gravestone:

Lise Meitner: a physicist who by no means misplaced her humanity.

Complement the intensely fascinating and essential Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics with pioneering astrophysicist Vera Rubin on what it’s prefer to be a girl in science, Margot Lee Shetterly on the untold story of the black ladies mathematicians who powered area exploration, and this illustrated homage to trailblazing ladies in science.