Lisa Meitner

It was the woman - Lise Meitner who was the first to theoretically explain the phenomenon of nuclear decay. Perhaps because of its origin? She was Jewish and worked in Germany - she was not included in the consideration of the Nobel Committee and in 1944 Otto Hahn received the Nobel Prize for nuclear fission.

In the second half of the 30s, Lisa Meitner, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann worked together on this issue in Berlin. The gentlemen were chemists, and Lisa was a physicist. In 1938, she had to flee from Germany to Sweden from Nazi persecution. For years, Hahn maintained that the discovery was based solely on chemical experiments after Meitner left Berlin. However, after some time it turned out that scientists constantly exchanged letters with each other, and in them their scientific conclusions and observations. Strassmann emphasized that Lise Meitner was the intellectual leader of the group all along. It all started in 1907 when Lise Meitner moved from Vienna to Berlin. At that time she was 28 years old. She began research on radioactivity with Otto Hahn. The collaboration resulted in the discovery in 1918 of protactinium, a heavy radioactive element. They were both respected scientists and professors at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft fur Chemie. Lise headed the independent department of physics, and Otto headed radiochemistry. There they decided together to explain the phenomenon of radioactivity. Despite great intellectual efforts, the work of Lise Meitner has not been appreciated over the years. Only in 1943, Lisa Meitmer was invited to Los Alamos, where research was underway to create an atomic bomb. She didn't go. In 1960 she moved to Cambridge, England and died there in 1968 at the age of 90, although she smoked cigarettes and worked with radioactive materials all her life. She never wrote an autobiography, nor did she authorize stories about her life written by others.

However, we know that she was interested in science since childhood and wanted to gain knowledge. Unfortunately, at the end of the 1901 century, girls were not allowed to attend gymnasiums, so Lisa had to be content with the municipal school (Bürgerschule). After graduating, she independently mastered the material necessary for the matriculation exam, and passed it at the age of 22, at the age of 1906, at the academic gymnasium in Vienna. In the same year, she began to study physics, mathematics and philosophy at the University of Vienna. Among her professors, Ludwig Boltzmann had the greatest influence on Lisa. Already in her first year, she became interested in the problem of radioactivity. In 1907, as the second woman in the history of the University of Vienna, she received her doctorate in physics. The topic of her dissertation was "Thermal Conductivity of Inhomogeneous Materials". After defending her doctorate, she unsuccessfully tried to start working for Skłodowska-Curie in Paris. After the refusal, she worked at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Vienna. At 30, she moved to Berlin to listen to lectures by Max Planck. It was there that she met the young Otto Hahn with whom she worked with short breaks for the next XNUMX years.