Lise Meitner (7 November 1878 - 27 October 1968) was an Austrian physicist who worked on radioactivity and nuclear physics. Meitner was part of the team that discovered nuclear fission, an achievement for which her colleague Otto Hahn was awarded the Nobel Prize.
Element 109, meitnerium, is named in her honor.
The dramatic splitting of the atom "nuclear fission" was a discovery which changed our world. Yet few know that it was Lise Meitner who helped research the discovery of the power of nuclear energy just after her dramatic escape from Nazi Germany. Her laboratory supervisor of thirty years, Otto Hahn, who remained in Berlin throughout the Third Reich, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1944. Meitner’s exclusion from sharing the Nobel Prize was in part related to her covert and frightened escape from Nazi Germany to Sweden.
Albert Einstein called the respected Viennese pioneer in nuclear physics our Madame Curie.
Lise’s parents were assimilated Viennese Jews, who did not practice legalistic Judaism. Her father Philipp was a lawyer whose family stemmed from Moravia. In 1873 he married Hedwig Skovran whose family had emigrated from Russia to Slovakia. They had eight children. Lise was born on November 7, 1878.
When Lise showed an early propensity for mathematics, she was privately tutored. Three of Lise’s sisters later also earned Ph.D. degrees. Lise focused her talents upon passing the difficult entrance examination to the University of Vienna.
At age 23, she was admitted to the university’s physics lectures and laboratories. From 1901-1906 she studied with experimentalist Anton Lampa, Stefan Meyer and, later, the famous theoretician Ludwig Boltzmann.
Lise Meitner received a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Vienna and it was there that she was introduced to Max Planck, father of the quantum theory, who traveled to Vienna after the tragic suicide of Boltzmann. In 1907 Planck invited Lise Meitner to Berlin for post-doctoral study and research - a move that was to change her career and life path. For several years she was not permitted access to the laboratories of the Berlin Institute for Chemistry where she worked as an non-paid research scientist (1907-1912).
In 1907, she was introduced to radio-chemist Otto Hahn, who became a thirty-year research partner in experimental work discovering new radioactive elements and unraveling their complex physical properties.
Meitner’s pioneering research on radioactive processes led her into an interdisciplinary field in which chemists collaborated with physicists in primitive laboratories, often tracing the "tracks" of decaying particles by eye long into the night. During the same year (1907) in which she arrived in Berlin, a young contemporary, Albert Einstein, was also invited to the University by Max Planck. Einstein, Paul Ehrenfest, Meitner and others would often gather at Planck’s home for evenings of music and conversation. She worked as Planck’s Physics Department assistant for nearly seven years, publishing on radioactive properties of newly-discovered elements and particles in conjunction with Otto Hahn, Otto von Baeyer, Max von Laue and many others.
In 1908 on a visit to Vienna Lise formally withdrew from the Jewish community and was baptized at the Evangelical (Lutheran) Congregation.
After the traumas in Germany related to World War I (during which Meitner served as an X-ray technician on the Austrian front from 1915-1917), Otto Hahn was named the Administrative Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry, while Meitner supervised the first-floor Physics Section, which she led for over twenty years until forced to flee Berlin under the Third Reich. At first she was an unpaid "guest" under Hahn.
From 1924 to 1934, the team gained international prestige and were nominated for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for ten consecutive years. Later, under Nazi stormclouds, the team was nominated for the 1936 Nobel Prize in Physics by Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, Bohr and von Laue, and Meitner was nominated for the Physics Prize three times by Niels Bohr after WWII.
Meitner specialized in several courses in quantum physics, until Adolf Hitler’s racist decrees in April, 1933 stripped Jewish academics of their professorial training. Einstein, safely out of Hitler’s range in America on a lecture tour in 1933, spoke out against Hitler. The Nazis retaliated by having his life savings confiscated, his books burned and other atrocities committed against his work on relativity. Meitner recorded many of these atrocities in detailed letters to her colleagues throughout the 1930s. However, she held her paid position at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry until the Third Reich’s invasion of Austria in 1938 (the Anschluss) brought Austrians under German law.
Dangers grew after 1938 when the National Socialists issued an order forbidding "famous scientists" to "travel abroad." Throughout the 1930s Meitner and Hahn had been competing with the Paris team of the Irene Joliot-Curies and Rome’s Enrico Fermi to unravel the complexities of the mysterious "transuranic" elements. Unknown to Lise Meitner, her escape route from Berlin was orchestrated by the international physics community and Danish physicist Niels Bohr. Her close partner Otto Hahn was not even notified of secret plans by Nobel-laureate Niels Bohr until days before her departure in July 1938. Dirk Coster, a Dutch physicist, secretly accompanied Meitner through the stressful train journey across Nazi borders into the Netherlands. With the assistance of Bohr, she departed for Copenhagen and then Sweden.
Meitner barely had time to unpack her small suitcases in a hotel room "home" when winter began to descend upon Stockholm. Lonely, she lived on a meager research assistant’s salary, working at the new Nobel Research Institute of Physics for the rest of the war years. Many of the Swedish scientists, including Nobel Prize committee member Manne Siegbahn, ignored her while they focused on top-secret defense work. Hence, by the holiday season, she decided to cross Sweden by train to visit her 29-year-old nephew Otto Robert Frisch, whose father had been arrested and sent to Dachau. Her correspondence with Hahn during December 1938 demonstrates that she continued to urge him and their assistant Fritz Strassman in Berlin to continue research she had instigated on uranium.
On December 24, she received a agitated letter from Hahn recounting a strange "bursting" he described as occurring to uranium, forming barium. Hahn begged his trusted colleague to interpret this process: "What would physics say about such bursting?" He had written up their findings and submitted them to Die Naturwissenschaften on December 21 without crediting her contributions, and this act would literally eclipse Lise Meitner’s contributions to the discovery of nuclear fission in 1938.
Meitner and her nephew Frisch took a hike in the snowy Swedish woods, animatedly discussing the puzzling "bursting" process. Then they realized: if E=mc2, that mass could not be lost, but the nucleus would be "split in two." (Frisch later dubbed this process "fission", a term used by biologists to describe the elongated splitting of a cell.) Meitner did the calculations: such "bursting" would yield tremendous energy. The insight was so dramatic that Meitner excitedly scribbled out the formulas on a scrap of paper there in the woods, urging Frisch to return to Copenhagen’s laboratories and replicate the experiments. She returned to Sweden and there, in January-March 1939, wrote a series of articles to be published in Nature with O.R. Frisch on the nuclear fission of uranium.
Niels Bohr was also travelling when he received the news of fission from Frisch. Hence, while crossing the Atlantic to America, Bohr confirmed fission; later, he and young John Archibald Wheeler at Princeton authored the definitive paper "The Mechanism of Fission," based in part on Meitner’s published research.
Through Bohr, by early 1939 the news of fission had spread across America. Fermi, Ernest O. Lawrence and others confirmed fission before Meitner and Frisch’s paper was circulated by Nature. Yet it was also Bohr’s tireless efforts which assured Meitner involvement in the international physics community, although Hahn was given credit for the discovery.
Lise Meitner and Albert Einstein were among the few scientists who did not work on weapons research during World War II.
In 1945, when she was recognized in America for her accomplishments, she dined with President Harry Truman, who at a dinner for the Women’s Press Club honoring Meitner’s accomplishments remarked, "So you’re the little lady who got us into all of this!" Yet despite misleading press reports in Sweden and President Truman’s misperceptions, Meitner never worked on the atomic bomb research itself.
In Sweden she encountered concentration camp victims released due to Count Folke Bernadotte’s efforts, and it was this grim reality which convinced her never to return to Germany or her former life there, although in 1947 Hahn and Strassmann invited her to re-join them at the rebuilt Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, West Germany. She declined his invitation to form a new Max Planck Institute for Chemistry named after their mentor, and instead retired in Sweden on a small pension negotiated through the President, Tage Erlander.
Lise Meitner was awarded numerous honorary doctorates by universities in the United States and Europe as well as the Enrico Fermi Prize, Atomic Energy Commission (U.S.) with Hahn and Strassmann in 1966. Meitner spent most of her 70s and 80s traveling. During her final years she lived close to her nephew Otto Robert Frisch, in Cambridge, England, where she died on October 27, 1968.
She was the aunt of Otto Robert Frisch. Her father was Philipp Meitner.
Meitner was born into a Jewish family as the third of eight children in Vienna, 2nd district (Leopoldstadt). Her father, Philipp Meitner, was one of the first Jewish lawyers in Austria. She was born on 7 November 1878. She shortened her name from Elise to Lise. The birth register of Vienna's Jewish community lists Meitner as being born on 17 November 1878, but all other documents list it as 7 November, which is what she used. As an adult, she converted to Christianity, following Lutheranism, and was baptized in 1908.
Meitner studied physics and obtained a doctoral degree in physics at the University of Vienna in 1905 ("Wärmeleitung im inhomogenen Körper"). Meitner was able to achieve a private education in physics in part because of her supportive parents, and she completed in 1901 with an "externe Matura" examination at the Akademisches Gymnasium.
In 1926, Meitner became a specialist in physics at the University of Berlin. There she undertook the research program in nuclear physics which eventually led to her support of Hahn's discovery of nuclear fission in 1939, after she had left Berlin. She was praised by Albert Einstein as the "German Marie Curie".
In 1930, Meitner assisted with a seminar on nuclear physics and chemistry led by Leó Szilárd.
With the discovery of the neutron in the early 1930s, speculation arose in the scientific community that it might be possible to create elements heavier than uranium (atomic number 92) in the laboratory.
A scientific race began between Ernest Rutherford in Britain, Irène Joliot-Curie in France, Enrico Fermi in Italy, and the Hahn/Meitner team in Berlin. None suspected that this research would culminate in nuclear weapons.
When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, Meitner was acting director of the Institute for Chemistry. Although she was protected by her Austrian citizenship, all other Jewish scientists, including her nephew Otto Frisch, Fritz Haber, Leó Szilárd and many other eminent figures, were dismissed or forced to resign from their posts. Most of them emigrated from Germany. Her response was to say nothing and bury herself in her work. In 1938, Meitner fled to Holland and finally arrived in Sweden. She later acknowledged, in 1946, that "It was not only stupid but also very wrong that I did not leave at once."
Following the doctoral degree, she rejected an offer to work in a gas lamp factory. Encouraged by her father and backed by his financial support, she went to Berlin. Max Planck allowed her to attend his lectures, an unusual gesture by Planck. After one year, Meitner became Planck's assistant. During the first years she worked together with chemist Otto Hahn and discovered with him several new isotopes. In 1909 she presented two papers on beta-radiation under the auspices of her supervisors.
In 1912 the research group Hahn/Meitner moved to the newly founded Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut (KWI) in Berlin-Dahlem, south west in Berlin. She worked without salary as a "guest" in Hahn's Department of Radiochemistry. It was not until 1913, at 35 years old and following an offer to go to Prague as associate professor, that she got a permanent position at KWI.
In the first part of World War I, she served as a nurse handling X-ray equipment. She returned to Berlin and her research in 1916, but not without inner struggle. She felt in a way ashamed of wanting to continue her research efforts when thinking about the pain and suffering of the victims of war and their medical and emotional needs.
In 1917, she and Hahn discovered the first long-lived isotope of the element protactinium, for which they were awarded the Leibniz Medal by the Berlin Academy of Sciences. That year, Meitner was given a physics section at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry.
In 1922, she researched the cause, known as the Auger effect, of the emission from surfaces of electrons with 'signature' energies. The effect is named for Pierre Victor Auger, a French scientist who independently discovered the effect in 1923.
After the Anschluss, her situation became desperate. On July 13, 1938, Meitner, with the support of Otto Hahn and the help from the Dutch physicists Dirk Coster and Adriaan Fokker, escaped to the Netherlands. She was forced to travel under cover to the Dutch border, where Coster persuaded German immigration officers that she had permission to travel to the Netherlands. She reached safety, though without her possessions. Meitner later said that she left Germany forever with ten marks in her purse. Before she left, Otto Hahn had given her a diamond ring he had inherited from his mother: this was to be used to bribe the frontier guards if required. It was not required, and Meitner's nephew's wife later wore it.
Meitner was lucky to escape, as Kurt Hess, a chemist who was the head of the organic department of the KWI and an avid Nazi, had informed the authorities that she was about to flee. An appointment at the University of Groningen did not come through, and she went instead to Stockholm, where she took up a post at Manne Siegbahn's laboratory. Here she established a working relationship with Niels Bohr, who travelled regularly between Copenhagen and Stockholm. She continued to correspond with Hahn and other German scientists.
On occasion of a lecture by Hahn in Bohr's Institute he, Meitner and Frisch met in Copenhagen on November 10th. Later they exchanged a series of letters. In December Hahn and Fritz Strassmann performed the difficult experiments which isolated the evidence for nuclear fission at their laboratory in Berlin. The surviving correspondence shows that Hahn recognized that fission was the only explanation for the barium (at first he named the process a 'bursting' of the uranium), but, baffled by this remarkable conclusion, he wrote to Meitner. The possibility that uranium nuclei might break up under neutron bombardment had been suggested years before in 1934.
However, by employing the existing "liquid-drop" model of the nucleus, Frisch with the assistance of Meitner were the first to articulate a theory of how the nucleus of an atom could be split into smaller parts: uranium nuclei had split to form barium and krypton, accompanied by the ejection of several neutrons and a large amount of energy (the latter two products accounting for the loss in mass). Frisch, with Meitner's assistance, had discovered the reason that no stable elements beyond uranium (in atomic number) existed naturally; the electrical repulsion of so many protons overcame the strong nuclear force.[25] Frisch with Meitner also first realized that Einstein's famous equation, E = mc2, explained the source of the tremendous releases of energy in nuclear fission, by the conversion of rest mass into kinetic energy, popularly described as the conversion of mass into energy.
A letter from Bohr, commenting on the fact that the amount of energy released when he bombarded uranium atoms was far larger than had been predicted by calculations based on a non-fissile core, had sparked the above inspiration in December 1938. But Frisch and his helpful Viennese assistant later confirmed that chemistry had been solely responsible for the discovery, although Hahn, as a chemist, was reluctant to explain the fission process in physics terms.
In a later appreciation Lise Meitner wrote:
The discovery of nuclear fission by Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann opened up a new era in human history. It seems to me that what makes the science behind this discovery so remarkable is that it was achieved by purely chemical means.
And in an interview with the West German television (ARD, March 8, 1959) Meitner said:
Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann were able to do this by exceptionally good chemistry, fantastically good chemistry, which was way ahead of what any one else was capable of at that time. The Americans learned to do it later. But at that time, Hahn and Strassmann were really the only ones who could do it. And that was because they were such good chemists. Somehow they really succeeded in using chemistry to demonstrate and prove a physical process.
Fritz Strassmann responded in the same interview with this clarification:
Meitner stated that the success could be attributed to chemistry. I have to make a slight correction. Chemistry merely isolated the individual substances, it did not precisely identify them. It took Professor Hahn's method to do this. This is where his achievement lies.
Hahn and Strassmann had sent the manuscript of their first paper to Naturwissenschaften in December 1938, reporting they had detected and identified the element barium after bombarding uranium with neutrons; simultaneously, Hahn had communicated their results exclusively to Meitner in several letters, and did not inform the physicists in his own institute.
In their second publication on the evidence of barium (Die Naturwissenschaften, 10 February 1939) Hahn and Strassmann used for the first time the name Uranspaltung (Uranium fission) and predicted the existence and liberation of additional neutrons during the fission process (which was proved later to be a chain reaction by Frédéric Joliot and his team). Frisch and Meitner were the first who correctly interpreted Hahn's and Strassmann's results as being nuclear fission, a term coined by Frisch, and published their paper in Nature. Frisch confirmed this experimentally on 13 January 1939.
These two reports, the first Hahn-Strassmann publication of January 6, 1939, and the Frisch-Meitner publication of February 11, 1939, had electrifying effects on the scientific community. Because there was a possibility that fission could be used as a weapon, and since the knowledge was in German hands, Leó Szilárd, Edward Teller, and Eugene Wigner jumped into action, persuading Albert Einstein, a celebrity, to write President Franklin D. Roosevelt a letter of caution.
In 1940 Frisch and Rudolf Peierls produced the Frisch-Peierls memorandum, which first set out how an atomic explosion could be generated, and this ultimately led to the establishment in 1942 of the Manhattan Project. Meitner refused an offer to work on the project at Los Alamos, declaring "I will have nothing to do with a bomb!" Meitner said that Hiroshima had come as a surprise to her, and that she was "sorry that the bomb had to be invented."
In Sweden, Meitner was first active at Siegbahn's Nobel Institute for Physics, and at the Swedish Defense Research Establishment (FOA) and the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, where she had a laboratory and participated in research on R1, Sweden's first nuclear reactor.
In 1947, a personal position was created for Meitner at the University College of Stockholm with the salary of a professor and funding from the Council for Atomic Research.
Meitner with actress Katharine Cornell and physicist Arthur Compton on 6 June 1946, when Meitner and Cornell were receiving awards from the National Conference of Christians and Jews:
On 15 November 1945 the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that Hahn had been awarded the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of nuclear fission. "Surely Hahn fully deserved the Nobel Prize for chemistry. There is really no doubt about it. But I believe that Otto Robert Frisch and I contributed something not insignificant to the clarification of the process of uranium fission - how it originates and that it produces so much energy and that was something very remote to Hahn." wrote Lise Meitner to her friend Eva von Bahr-Bergius in November 1945. And Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, Lise Meitner's former assistant, later added: "He certainly did deserve this Nobel Prize. He would have deserved it even if he had not made this discovery. But everyone recognized that the splitting of the atomic nucleus merited a Nobel Prize."
Christian historians who have documented their view of the discovery of nuclear fission do not believe Meitner should have been awarded the Nobel Prize with Hahn.
On a visit to the USA in 1946, she received the honour of "Woman of the Year" by the National Press Club and had dinner with President Harry Truman and others at the Women's National Press Club. She lectured at Princeton, Harvard and other US universities, and was awarded a number of honorary doctorates.
Meitner refused to move back to Germany, and enjoyed retirement and research in Stockholm until her relocation to Cambridge, England in 1960.
She received the Max Planck Medal of the German Physics Society in 1949, and in 1955 she was awarded the first Otto Hahn Prize of the German Chemical Society. In 1957 the German President Theodor Heuss awarded her the highest German order for scientists, the peace class of the Pour le mérite. For both honors she was proposed by Otto Hahn. Meitner was nominated to receive the Nobel Prize three times. An even rarer honor was given to her in 1997 when element 109 was named meitnerium in her honor. Named after Meitner was the Hahn-Meitner Institut in Berlin.
Meitner was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1945, and had her status changed to that of a Swedish member in 1951. Four years later she became a foreign member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in London.
In 1966 Hahn, Fritz Strassmann and Meitner were jointly awarded the Enrico Fermi Award.
Meitner received 21 scientific honors and awards for her work (including 5 honorary doctorates and membership of many academies). In 1947 she received the Award of the City of Vienna for science. She was a member of the scientific class of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. In 2008, the NBC defense school of the Austrian Armed Forces established the "Lise Meitner" award.
In 1960, Meitner was awarded the Wilhelm Exner Medal and in 1967, the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art.
In July 2014 a statue of Lise Meitner was unveiled in the garden of the Humboldt University of Berlin next to similar statues of Hermann von Helmholtz and Max Planck.
Schools and streets were named after her in many cities in Austria and Germany.
After the war, Meitner, while acknowledging her own moral failing in staying in Germany from 1933 to 1938, was bitterly critical of Hahn and other German scientists who had collaborated with the Nazis and done nothing to protest against the crimes of Hitler's regime. Referring to the leading German scientist Werner Heisenberg, she said: "Heisenberg and many millions with him should be forced to see these camps and the martyred people."
As she might have bemoaned present-day racist reparationists for running propagandist-promotional bumper stickers for Kenyan-not-Hawaiian-born dictator-in-chief and pseudo-"president" Barack Hussein Obama, she purportedly lamented the following accusation against certain scientific-community collaborators with Hitler and his Nazis:
"You all worked for Nazi Germany. And you tried to offer only a passive resistance. Certainly, to buy off your conscience you helped here and there a persecuted person, but millions of innocent human beings were allowed to be murdered without any kind of protest being uttered. First you betrayed your friends, then your children in that you let them stake their lives on a criminal war - and finally that you betrayed Germany itself, because when the war was already quite hopeless, you did not once arm yourselves against the senseless destruction of Germany."
Hahn wrote in his memoirs that he and Lise Meitner had been lifelong friends.
Meitner became a Swedish citizen in 1949. She retired in 1960 and moved to the UK where most of her relatives were, although she continued working part-time and giving lectures. A strenuous trip to the United States in 1964 led to Meitner having a heart attack, from which she spent several months recovering. Her physical and mental condition weakened by atherosclerosis, she was unable to travel to the US to receive the Enrico Fermi prize and relatives had to present it to her. After breaking her hip in a fall and suffering several small strokes in 1967, Meitner made a partial recovery, but eventually was weakened to the point where she moved into a Cambridge nursing home. She died on 27 October 1968 at the age of 89.
Meitner was not informed of the deaths of Otto Hahn (d. July 1968) and his wife Edith, as her family believed it would be too much for someone so frail. As was her wish, she was buried in the village of Bramley in Hampshire, at St. James parish church, close to her younger brother Walter, who had died in 1964. Her nephew Otto Frisch composed the inscription on her headstone. It reads "Lise Meitner: a physicist who never lost her humanity".
In summary:
Lise Meitner was born on November 7, 1878, in Vienna, Austria. The third of eight children of a Jewish family, she entered the University of Vienna in 1901, studying physics under Ludwig Boltzmann. After she obtained her doctorate degree in 1906, she went to Berlin in 1907 to study with Max Planck and the chemist Otto Hahn. She worked together with Hahn for 30 years, each of them leading a section in Berlin's Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry. Hahn and Meitner collaborated closely, studying radioactivity, with her knowledge of physics and his knowledge of chemistry. In 1918, they discovered the element protactinium.
In 1923, Meitner researched the radiationless transition known as the Auger effect, which is named for Pierre Victor Auger, a French scientist who discovered the effect two years later.
After Austria was annexed by Germany in 1938, Meitner was forced to flee Germany for Sweden. She continued her work at Manne Siegbahn's institute in Stockholm, but with little support. Hahn and Meitner met clandestinely in Copenhagen in November to plan a new round of experiments. The experiments that provided the evidence for nuclear fission were done at Hahn's laboratory in Berlin and published in January 1939. In February 1939, Meitner assisted her nephew, physicist Otto Frisch, in publishing physical explanation for the observations who named the process "nuclear fission." The discovery led other scientists to prompt Albert Einstein to write President Franklin D. Roosevelt a warning letter, which led to the Manhattan Project.
In 1944, Hahn was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his research into fission, but Meitner was ignored, partly because he questionable credibility as a female, and partly because Hahn downplayed her role ever since she left Germany. Hahn, Meitner, and Strassman were awarded the Enrico Fermi Award. On a visit to the U.S. in 1946, she was given total American press celebrity treatment, as someone who had "left Germany with the bomb in my purse."
Meitner retired to Cambridge, England, in 1960, where she died October 27. In 1992, element 109, the heaviest known element in the universe, was named Meitnerium (Mt) in her honor. Many consider Lise Meitner the "most significant woman scientist of the 20th Century."
Again, Lise Meitner was born on November 7, 1878 in Vienna, Austria. Upon receiving a doctorate in physics from the University of Vienna in 1906, Meitner went to the University of Berlin. There, she began to work with a chemist, Otto Hahn, she doing the physics and he the chemistry of radioactive substances. The collaboration continued for 30 years, each heading a section in Berlin's Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry.
In 1938 she was forced to leave Germany and went to Sweden. In her absence, Hahn and Fritz Strassmann continued experiments they had begun earlier with Meitner. Hahn wrote to Meitner, describing the results and while visiting her nephew Otto Frisch in Denmark, they proved that a splitting of the uranium atom was energetically feasible. This process was described in a landmark 1939 letter to the journal Nature with a term borrowed from biology: fission. Immediately, these results were confirmed around the world. In 1944, Hahn was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for his research into fission, but Meitner was ignored. In 1966, when Hahn, Meitner, and Strassmann were awarded the Enrico Fermi Award.
She retired to Cambridge, England where she died October 27, 1968. In 1997, it was announced that element 109 would be given the official name meitnerium (Mt) in her honor.
