Politics, Persecution, and the Prize: Lise Meitner and the Discovery of Nuclear Fission (original) (raw)

2018, Politics, Persecution, and the Prize: Lise Meitner and the Discovery of Nuclear Fission

The discovery of nuclear fission took place in Berlin at the end of 1938, and the Nobel Prize for the discovery was awarded to the chemist Otto Hahn in 1945. Because the award excluded the physicist Lise Meitner, it has always been controversial, raising questions about the fairness and competency of the Nobel decisions. Here I outline the interdisciplinary collaboration of Meitner, Hahn, and Fritz Strassmann in Berlin that culminated in the fission discovery, showing how Meitner's forced emigration from Germany distorted the scientific attribution for the discovery and led Hahn to deny that Meitner and physics had contributed to it. In discussing the Nobel decisions to award a prize only to Hahn, and not to Meitner, Strassmann, or Otto Robert Frisch, with whom Meitner devised the first theoretical interpretation of the fission process, I examine Meitner's situation as a woman and a foreigner in Swedish exile and her difficult experience with the Swedish physicist Manne Siegbahn.

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