The Woman Who Split the Atom: The Life of Lise Meitner

by Marissa Moss

She refused, saying, “I will have nothing to do with a bomb!” She wanted to stop the Nazis any way she could—except by developing a superweapon. For her, physics had always been about truth, not power, about understanding the world, not manipulating it. Scientists had a responsibility to be aware of the moral implications of their work.

While the Allies rushed to build the bomb, the Germans had decided such a thing was unlikely.

Didn’t invest in it because “unlikely”—not the same as impossible though. Don’t underestimate competition when it comes to what’s improbable and important.

Speer met again with Heisenberg and his group, including Hahn. He listened to their complaints about weak funding and passed on the message to Hitler, a second chance to rethink atomic studies. But Hitler had just received a report on exactly this subject from his photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, denying the need for any more support.

Speer wrote, “It is significant that Hitler did not choose the direct route of obtaining information on this matter from responsible people but depended instead on unreliable and incompetent informants to give him a Sunday-supplement account. Here again was proof of his love for amateurishness and his lack of understanding of fundamental scientific research.”

Go to the source—filtered information is less valuable for things with high impact. The more impactful the outcome, the more you want the details.

When Meitner heard again from Hahn, he reported that nuclear fission gave them a choice between a “super-explosive” or a “uranium machine.” He told her that he chose the uranium machine (a nuclear reactor for energy production) as the easier to build and the safer option. Heisenberg agreed and presented this to Hitler. The nuclear program was stepped up, though still underfunded compared to missile research. This news was passed on to Rosbaud.

Meitner’s role in the war—channel for gathering intelligence from German scientists that still talked to her about their work and sharing it with the allied countries. Meitner based on Stockholm Sweden during this time—neutral with Germany.

Hahn described the enormous potential of a nuclear chain reaction but ended his talk with doubts that “it was possible to surmount the technical difficulties involved.” He didn’t know that Frisch and Peierls had already solved two of the technical problems—the amount of uranium needed and how to sustain a chain reaction. He didn’t know about the Manhattan Project. All he knew was that the German government had given up on an atomic weapon. He assumed everyone else had as well.

A reminder that so long as it isn’t physically impossible—only improbable—that important problems can and will be solved by the people prepared and intent to do so.

This news, though, didn’t slow the pace at Los Alamos. Germany was too much of a scientific powerhouse to be underestimated.

Don’t underestimate your competition, and don’t overestimate their abilities such that if they cannot solve it you become demoralized. Keep pace and carry on.

Hahn wrote bitter, angry letters to Meitner about the bombings. He would later claim he had no idea of the deprivations in the camps, though he saw the skeletal prisoners himself. He was too focused on his own losses to think about anyone else.

Incentive caused bias can lead good people to do, or at least not act against, bad things. Self preservation as a form of incentive caused bias.

Meitner hadn’t confronted Hahn when he’d worked on toxic gas during World War I. She hadn’t criticized him when he received the Emil Fischer Medal while she was awarded only a copy. She hadn’t argued with him when he’d taken full credit for her discovery of nuclear fission. But this was something she couldn’t ignore. For once, she wasn’t timid or solicitous. She was furious.

Dear Otto, This month, I have written a great number of letters to you in my mind, because it was clear to me that even people like you and Laue have not grasped the real situation.

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All of you also worked for Nazi Germany, and never attempted passive resistance. Of course, to save your troubled consciences you occasionally helped an oppressed person; still you let millions of innocent people be murdered, and there was never a sound of protest. I must write you this because so much of what happens to you and Germany now depends upon your recognizing what all of you allowed to happen . . .

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They should force a man like Heisenberg, and millions of others with him, to see these camps and tortured people. His performance in Denmark in 1941 cannot be forgotten. [She is referring to the famous conversation with Bohr, fishing for information about atomic weapons, while posing as morally superior.]

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You might remember while I was still in Germany (and today I know that it was not only stupid but very unfair of me not to have gone away immediately) I often said to you, “As long as just we [the Jews] and not you have sleepless nights, it won’t get any better in Germany.” But you never had even one sleepless night. You didn’t want to see it; it was too inconvenient. I could prove it to you with many examples, big and small. Please believe me that all I write here is an attempt to help you all.

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But they got one quote from her right: “I must stress that I myself have not in any way worked on the smashing of the atom with the idea of producing death-dealing weapons. You must not blame us scientists for the use to which war technicians have put our discoveries.”

Meitner answered, “I agree—perfectly—that women have a responsibility—and we are obliged to try—so far as we can—to prevent another war. And I hope the construction of the atom bomb not only will help to finish this awful war, these wars here and in Japan, but that we will be able to use this large energy release for peaceful work.”

Meitner used her time on the radio to call for more women to work in the sciences and in the peace process. She urged that atomic energy should be used only for “peaceful work.”

He asked Meitner about her work and ended with a question about what she thought nuclear fission could be used for in times of peace. Meitner’s reply was an accurate prediction: “It could be used to drive submarines, aircraft, and industrial power.”

Even as a political prisoner with his country in ruins, Hahn’s first concern was that Meitner was getting accolades he felt he alone deserved. He was desperate for the world to know of his incredible work.

The letter omitted mentioning that the “discovery” wasn’t replicated in “many laboratories” until Meitner’s interpretation was reported by Bohr at the physics conference. Hahn’s initial article described a failure, not a discovery. It’s also notable that Meitner and Frisch were downgraded to “research workers,” that they weren’t credited with discovering fission, only with noticing the energy released by splitting the uranium atom.

Anyone working on nuclear physics knew the truth and was surprised that the committee had blatantly ignored Fritz Strassmann, who had done the work alongside Hahn, and Meitner and Frisch, who had interpreted and given meaning to the experiments. Without the physicists, there would have been no discovery of nuclear fission, just some odd-looking experiments that Hahn presented as failures.

Hahn called Meitner a “bitter, disappointed woman,” his usual criticism of her. When she complained about how Jews were treated, she was “bitter.” When she chafed at being described as his assistant rather than partner, she was “bitter.” And when she accused him of kicking her out of the KWI, she was “bitter.”

Don’t be Hahn. Ungrateful, compromised, self centered. Lacks character and integrity.

Meitner expected that even though the prize had been awarded only to Hahn, he would set the record straight and tell the world about her essential role. She sat waiting, her face hardening, as he talked about his amazing research. There was not one word about her revolutionary interpretation of the experiments Hahn had found so puzzling.

Her hope for her friend is unconditional it seems, despite the repeated disappointments.

Meitner wrote in a letter that Hahn was “forgetting the past and instead stressing the injustice that is being done to Germany. Since I am a part of the past to be repressed, Hahn has not mentioned our long cooperation or even my name in those interviews in which he talked about his life’s work.”

He may not have been willing to share the public fame, but his conscience urged him to at least split the money. Meitner, disgusted with such a feeble gesture, gave every penny to the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, in Princeton, helping to settle Jewish refugee scientists. Hahn may have forgotten her refugee status, but she hadn’t.

Meitner was deeply disturbed by this strain in her former friends, this entrenched unwillingness to admit passive complicity, along with absolutely no recognition of the poisonous anti-Semitism still embedded in German culture. It was a chasm they would never bridge. Meitner would never return to Germany to live.

While Hahn focused on rebuilding German science and reestablishing his career, Meitner turned her attention to science’s ethical responsibilities. She spoke about scientists’ need for a moral framework, the dangers of creating Frankenstein monsters in the name of progress. She may have sparked the work on the atomic bomb, but she was determined that physics should return to the pure search for truth she’d always loved.

She was determined to prove that atomic energy could be useful, peaceful, a gift to humanity rather than a curse. With Eklund, she built the first experimental reactor in Sweden, a step toward making a power-generating nuclear reactor.

Science remained her life, though, and she worked until 1954, retiring at age seventy-five.

She described how all her achievements had been erased. German literature mentioned her only as a “long-term co-worker of Hahn.” She asked him, “What would you say if you were to be characterized as a ‘long-term co-worker’ of mine? After the last fifteen years, which I wouldn’t wish on a good friend, shall my scientific past also be taken from me? Is that fair? And why is it happening?” He said nothing.

She had made major discoveries, including the one that defined the twentieth century. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry or Physics forty-eight times: twenty-nine for physics, nineteen for chemistry.

Then, in 1955, Meitner was awarded the newly minted Otto Hahn Prize for Chemistry and Physics, given by the German Chemical Society.

Even after she left her position, Meitner never gave up physics. Instead, she focused on political questions concerning science, including the status of women in science and the military use of nuclear energy. She worked at the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency on control of nuclear weapons until her mid-eighties, hoping to leave the world a safer place.

Meitner died in 1968, shortly before her ninetieth birthday.

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Her epitaph reads: “A physicist who never lost her humanity.”

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Decades after her death, the woman who had been so famous was erased from the history of physics yet again. All the credit for discovering nuclear fission was given to Otto Hahn alone.

In 1994, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, the commission in charge of naming elements, approved element 109 as meitnerium, or Mt. Meitnerium is now part of the periodic table, along with other elements named after famous scientists, such as rutherfordium, seaborgium, bohrium, roentgenium, copernicium, mendelevium, nobelium, lawrencium, fermium, einsteinium, and curium. Meitner, nominated almost fifty times for a Nobel Prize, had finally joined the list of the most important physicists, a place where she has long belonged.