Lise Meitner
Sciences & Discovery • Historical Archive • 🇦🇹 Austria • 9 views

Lise Meitner 🇦🇹

Lise Meitner (Known as "Mother of Nuclear Fission & Theoretical Nuclear Physicist")
Nuclear Physicist, Kaiser Wilhelm Institute & Stockholm, Enrico Fermi Awardee
Born 7 November 1878 🇦🇹 Vienna, Austria
Passed Away 27 October 1968 Cambridge, United Kingdom
Lifespan 89 years old
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"Lise Meitner: a physicist who never lost her humanity. Science makes people reach endlessly for truth and objectivity."

Archival Overview

Austrian-Swedish nuclear physicist who co-discovered nuclear fission and formulated its theoretical explanation using E = mc², opening the atomic era, honored by chemical element 109 (meitnerium).

Biographical Record

Lise Meitner (1878–1968) earned her doctorate in physics in Vienna and partnered with chemist Otto Hahn for thirty years at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. Forced to flee Nazi Germany in 1938 as an Austrian of Jewish heritage, Meitner escaped to Sweden.

In December 1938, when Hahn observed barium after neutron bombardment of uranium, Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch mathematically proved that the uranium nucleus had split—a phenomenon she named 'nuclear fission'. Calculating the massive 200 MeV energy release with Einstein's E = mc², Meitner unlocked nuclear energy. Element 109 was named meitnerium in her honor.

Key Life Milestones

11 February 1939 CE

Theoretical Explanation of Nuclear Fission

Published the historic Nature paper with Otto Frisch explaining the physical mechanism of uranium splitting.

September 1966 CE

Enrico Fermi Award

Awarded the Enrico Fermi Award by the US Atomic Energy Commission jointly with Hahn and Strassmann.

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Final Resting Place

Perpetual Memorial
St. James Parish Churchyard (Bramley, Hampshire)
Cambridge, United Kingdom
GPS: 51.3211, -1.0603
View on Memory Atlas
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