Meitner wrote, “I almost understood him!” She did grasp some things: “At that time I certainly did not yet realize the full implications of his theory of relativity and the way in which it would contribute to a revolutionary transformation of our concepts of time and space. In the course of this lecture he did, however, take the theory of relativity and . . . showed that to every radiation must be attributed an inert mass. These two facts were so overwhelmingly new and surprising that, to this day, I remember the lecture well.” She would in fact remember the ideas when she needed them most, to
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