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.
To ask about any aspect of Accelerated Learning, e-mail michael2007 (at) happychild.org.uk . Due to Michael's hectic schedule, he may not be able to write back, but will do his best to cover the main issues raised, in future articles [more about Michael on the page here].
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