Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics

Lise Meitner (1878-1968) was a pioneer of nuclear physics and codiscoverer, with Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, of nuclear fission. Of Jewish origin, she fled Nazi Germany for Stockholm in 1938 and later moved to Cambridge, England. Ruth Sime's absorbing book is the definitive biography of Lise Meitner, the story of a brilliant woman whose extra-ordinary life illustrates not only the dramatic scientific progress but also the injustice and destruction that have marked the twentieth century. A shy girl, Meitner grew up to be a renowned scientist. Braving the sexism of the scientific world, she joined the prestigious Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry and became a prominent member of the international physics community. Her career was shattered when she fled Germany, and her scientific reputation was damaged when Hahn took full credit - and the 1944 Nobel Prize - for the work they had done together on nuclear fission. Sime uses primary archival material, much of it unpublished, to show Meitner's interaction with her illustrious contemporaries, including Planck, Bohr, Einstein, Fermi, van Laue, and Franck. In Meitner's letters and personal papers we hear her speak for herself about science, the rise of Nazism, Holocaust atrocities, and the postwar nuclear age. She refused to work on the Allied atomic bomb and was greatly concerned about nuclear weapons after the war. When Lise Meitner died in England at the age of ninety she was a solitary figure, betrayed by her friend and collaborator Hahn, but still passionate about physics. In the year following the fiftieth anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, the story of this remarkable woman has particular resonance.