Lise Meitner
She explained nuclear fission—and refused to build the bomb
Both parents were Jews; her father Philipp was among the first Jews admitted to the bar in Austria. She converted to Lutheranism in 1908, aged twenty-nine, by her own decision—an adult one, for the sake of a post and a way of life—and it saved her from nothing: under the racial laws she lost her Berlin position, and in July 1938 she fled Germany illegally with ten marks and a ring Hahn gave her.
She was nominated forty-nine times—thirty in Physics (1937–67) and nineteen in Chemistry (1924–48), among the nominators Planck, Heisenberg, von Laue and Franck. The usual figure of forty-eight is stale. She won nothing; the Fermi Award came in 1966.
She refused the Manhattan Project outright: "I will have nothing to do with a bomb!" So "the Jewish mother of the atomic bomb" is not a nickname but a falsehood: the American press invented it in 1945, and Meitner hated it. On her birth date: the Vienna community register says 17 November 1878, while she herself wrote 7 November on every document.
Places
Sources
Scholarship
- The Nobel nomination archive, Lise Meitner — forty-nine nominations: thirty in Physics and nineteen in Chemistry
- Wikipedia, “Lise Meitner”; Rabbi Sime, biography — the 1908 conversion; the flight of July 1938; the refusal of the bomb
Basis: documents and evidence.