The summer blockbuster “Oppenheimer” told the story of how the atomic bomb was built, but according to New York Times science reporter Katrina Miller, the movie left out a key player: Lise Meitner.
Meitner, the “Madame Curie of Germany,” as Albert Einstein referred to her, went unmentioned in the film, even though she “worked closely with (Otto) Hahn and developed the theory of nuclear fission,” Miller wrote for The New York Times. She was sometimes called the “mother of the atomic bomb,” but she rejected the label.
Born in Vienna in 1878, Meitner was the second woman to earn a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Vienna in 1905. Her career took her to Berlin, Germany, where she worked with Max Planck and Hahn. She became the first woman to be a full professor of physics at University of Berlin in 1922, according to the National Park Service.
But when the Nazi regime started gaining power, she had to flee Germany. She eventually moved to Sweden and still corresponded with Hahn by mail to interpret findings for him, Miller reported for the Times.
“Perhaps you can come up with some sort of fantastic explain,” Hahn reportedly wrote to Miller. “If there is anything you could propose that you could publish, then it would still in a way be work by the three of us!” When the work in question was published, Meitner’s contribution was not named, per the Times.
While she was not named as a contributor on Hahn’s paper, she and her nephew, Otto Frisch, published a paper in 1939 in the journal Nature that “explained the physics behind nuclear fission,” coining the term itself, according to the Atomic Heritage Foundation.
Later in 1944, Hahn won a Nobel Prize in chemistry for work on nuclear fission, and though Meitner was nominated and was crucial to the development of nuclear fission, she did not win, Miller wrote for the Times.
Marissa Moss, author of “The Woman Who Split the Atom,” told Miller that the snub hurt Meitner and she thinks the combination of Meitner’s gender and Jewish heritage prevented her from winning.
Once the records of Nobel Prize deliberations became public for the 1946 physics prize, Elisabeth Crawford, Ruth Lewin Sime and Mark Walker published an analysis of the papers in Physics Today, saying her exclusion pointed toward four factors.
These factors included: “The difficulty of evaluating an interdisciplinary discovery, a lack of expertise in theoretical physics, Sweden’s scientific and political isolation during the war, and a general failure of the evaluation committees to appreciate the extent to which German persecution of Jews skewed the published scientific record.”
Meitner was nominated for the Nobel Prize 48 times by her colleagues, according to Doris A. Corradini, Katja Geiger and Brigitte Mazohl. There are many who think Meitner should have won the Nobel Prize.
Though Meitner did not win the Nobel Prize, her work was significant to the understanding of what nuclear fission is.
Specifically, “Meitner was the first to realize the amount of energy that was released and applied Einstein’s E=mc2 equation to calculate the energy that was released,” according to Stanford University.
“It took the scientific community a long time to recognize the scientific achievements of Lise Meitner,” an article published on the European Physical Society website reads. “She did not share the Nobel Prize in chemistry for the discovery of fission with her colleague, Otto Hahn, in 1944. Today she is justly considered to be one of the most important physicists of the 20th century.”
Though Meitner was invited to join the Manhattan Project, she refused to join: “I will have nothing to do with a bomb,” she said, per the National Park Service.
Meitner never won a Nobel Prize. Her tombstone reads “A physicist who never lost her humanity,” per Britannica.