Ruth Lewin Sime

• PhD
• Professor Emeritus at Sacramento City College

Lise Meitner (1878–1968) lebte und arbeitete 22 Jahre lang in Stockholm – von dem Zeitpunkt, als sie 1938 aus Deutschland floh, bis sie 1960 in Rente ging und nach England zog. Grundsätzlich war ihre Auswanderung insofern ein erfolg, weil Schweden ihr Zuflucht gewährte, als sie diese am dringendsten benötigte, und sie so denHolocaust überlebte. ihr...

During the 1920s and 1930s, Viennese physicist Marietta Blau (1894–1970) pioneered the use of photographic methods for imaging high-energy nuclear particles and events. In 1937 she and Hertha Wambacher discovered “disintegration stars” – the tracks of massive nuclear disintegrations – in emulsions exposed to cosmic radiation. This discovery launche...

As the co-discoverer of nuclear fission and director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry, Otto Hahn (1879–1968) took part in Germany‘s nuclear-fission project throughout the Second World War. I outline Hahn’s efforts to mobilize his institute for military-related research; his inclusion in high-level scientific structures of the military...

One of the longstanding attractions of the Deutsches Museum in Munich, Germany, has been its display of the apparatus associated with the discovery of nuclear fission. Although the discovery involved three scientists, Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner, and Fritz Strassmann, the fission display was designated for over 30years as the Arbeitstisch von Otto Hahn...

AcknowledgmentReferences and Notes

. As President of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society and its successor, the Max Planck Society, from 1946 until 1960, Otto Hahn (1879–1968) sought to portray science under the Third Reich as a purely intellectual endeavor untainted by National Socialism. I outline Hahn’s activities from 1933 into the postwar years, focusing on the contrast between his pers...

Lise Meitner was among the great physicists whose work spanned the development of atomic and nuclear physics in the 20th century. She identified herself as a physicist above all else, but she was also a ‘non-Aryan’ who lost nearly everything when forced out of Germany, and a woman whose success did not transfer into exile. When nuclear fission was...

FALL IS NOBEL SEASON, AS IT HAS been nearly every year for a century. The awards were suspended only in the darkest periods of two world wars; otherwise, even in times of international tension and fear, the Nobel announcements capture the attention of scientists and the news media all over the world. The ritual is familiar: Early-morning calls from...

Most accounts of the Manhattan Project focus on physicists, and the physicists are men. True, there are prominent exceptions—Leona Woods Marshall appears in occasional Los Alamos photographs, and so does Chien-Shung Wu. But for the most part, women are out of the picture and absent from the scientific history of the massive, secret effort in the U....

The synthesis of new, artificial elements beyond uranium was at the cutting-edge of physical research in the 1930s, and nearly half a dozen transuranium elements were reported between 1934 and 1938. Nuclear physicists and radiochemists collaborated closely, but each field introduced fundamental assumptions that proved to be false: that nuclear chan...

Vor 60 Jahren entdeckten Otto Hahn, Fritz Straßmann und Lise Meitner die Kernspaltung. Jetzt veröffentlichte Dokumente der Schwedischen Akademie der Wissenschaften lassen erkennen, warum Lise Meitner den Nobelpreis für Physik im Jahre 1946 für ihre theoretische Interpretation des Prozesses nicht erhielt.

In November 1945, three months after the end of World War II, a narrow majority of the members of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences decided to award the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Otto Hahn for the discovery of nuclear fission. The award was and still remains controversial, primarily because Hahn's Berlin colleagues, the chemist Frit...

Recently released documents give the inside story of Otto Hahn's 1944 Nobel prize in chemistry for the discovery of nuclear fission. They reveal flaws in the award-making process - and an attempt to rewrite history.

In the first part of this century, at a time when few women obtained a higher education and even fewer entered the scientific professions, two exceptional women achieved great prominence in physics: Marie Curie in radioactivity and Lise Meitner in nuclear physics. In this article I outline the scientific work of Meitner and Curie, in the context of...

Lise Meitner fled Germany for Sweden in 1938. Her professional difficulties in Stockholm coupled with her exclusion from the discovery of fission diminished her ability to work, damaged her reputation and, in the opinion of many of her contemporaries, kept her from a Nobel prize.

Über Lise Meitner ist viel geschrieben worden, und doch ist sie immer eine Randfigur geblieben. Über ihre bahnbrechenden Leistungen in der Kernphysik ist nur wenig bekannt, ihren Namen assoziiert man hauptsächlich mit der Kernspaltung; die Anerkennung ihres Anteils an dieser Entdeckung blieb ihr jedoch verwehrt. Insbesondere in Deutschland haben di...

Much has been written about Lise Meitner, but she remains on the periphery. Of her pioneering work in nuclear physics, little is said; she is remembered primarily for nuclear fission, a discovery in which she did not share. Especially in Germany the staging seldom varies: Otto Hahn in the spotlight, Fritz Straßmann in his shadow, Lise Meitner in th...

Although physicist LiseMeitner is known for the first theoretical explanation of nuclear fission, the discovery itself is generally attributed only to her co-workers OttoHahn and FritzStrassmann. In fact, however,Meitner was essential to the discovery at every phase: she brought the uranium investigation to Berlin, led the Berlin group for four yea...

Lise Meitner (1878-1968) achieved prominence as a nuclear physicist in Germany; although of Jewish origin, her Austrian citizenship exempted her from Nazi racial laws until the annexation of Austria in 1938 precipitated her dismissal. Forbidden to emigrate, she narrowly escaped to the Netherlands with the help of concerned friends in the internatio...

To understand the life and work of Lise Meitner, and to gain new insight into the discovery of fission itself, gaps must be filled in and discrepancies explained. Keywords (Audience): General Public

The crystal and molecular structure of ferrocenyldiphenylcyclopropenium tetrafluoroborate has been determined by an X-ray diffraction study of a single crystal specimen. The monoclinic cell, space group P21/c, with a = 8.219 (3), b = 14.708 (3), and c = 17.857 (3) Å and β= 103.60 (5)°, contains four formula units (C25H19-FeBF4); the calculated X-ra...

In her prime, it seemed that Lise Meitner (1878-1968) was not only an exception but a pioneer: she was recognized as one of the great physicists of her day, and her career was a series of milestones for the inclusion and normalization of women in science. And yet, unlike many of her male contemporaries, her prominence did not survive emigration and...

Die Geschichte von Lise Meitner (1878-1968) ist mit dem Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Chemie vom Zeitpunkt der Institutsgründung 1912 bis zum Vorabend ihrer Flucht 1938 fest verbunden. Während der ersten 20 Jahre zeugt diese Verbindung von der Erfolgsgeschichte einer Frau, die auf dem Gebiet der Physik außerordentliche Bedeutung erlangte. Ab 1933 wir...