Lise Meitner

Lise Meitner was the Austrian Scientist who defined fission (the process that atomic nuclei go through when they divide). She was one of Germany's leading scientists and was described by Einstein as "our Madame Curie". Head of the theoretical physics division at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute and a senior staff member at the University of Berlin when Hitler came to power, Meitner was immediately sacked because she was Jewish. Austrian citizenship allowed funding of her post by the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute but eventually jealous colleagues who were active in the Nazi party forced her out.

Meitner moved to Stockholm but continued to advise her former colleagues in Berlin on how they should conduct their experiments that looked at guiding streams of slow neutrons into uranium. A particular problem bothered the team in Berlin and it was while out on a walk with her nephew, a promising physicist, that the problem was solved. Meitner correctly identified that the results that were being achieved in Berlin came about because the uranium nucleus had been split in half. When the results were published the Berlin team took the credit.

Meitner died in England in 1968 but will forever be remembered, as a new chemical element - number 109 in the Periodic Table - was created in 1982 and named MEITNERIUM.

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