Author Description

When sixty-year-old Lise Meitner fled Nazi Germany in 1938, she carried with her nothing but a small valise and a deep, abiding passion for physics. Eight years later Meitner, co-discoverer with Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann of nuclear fission, watched as Hahn alone received the Nobel Prize for their joint research. In telling the dramatic personal story of this extraordinary woman, Ruth Sime's definitive biography illuminates the scientific and social progress and the injustice and destruction that have marked the twentieth century. As a shy young woman from Vienna, Lise Meitner braved the institutional sexism of the scientific world to make a place for herself at the prestigious Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin. She became prominent in the international physics community and was a pioneer of nuclear physics. Her career spanned the development of atomic physics from the early years of radioactivity to the brink of the nuclear age. She refused to participate in the Allied atomic bomb project and was greatly concerned about the development of nuclear weapons after the war. Using the huge collection of Meitner's personal papers, correspondence and interviews with her contemporaries and friends, and a wealth of largely unpublished archival material, Sime lets us hear the voice of the scientist and the woman. Among Meitner's teachers, colleagues, and friends were many of the great physicists of all time - Boltzmann, Planck, Rutherford, Bohr, Einstein, Fermi, Franck, Pauli, von Laue, and others. Her unusual collegiality and friendship with Otto Hahn, which survived the early years of the Third Reich, was later broken and betrayed. In her letters and papers, Meitner speaks about science, the rise of Nazism, the Holocaust, the unhappiness of her Swedish exile, her exclusion from the Nobel Prize, and the postwar German mentality that all but destroyed her scientific reputation.