Lise Meitner Collection 1838-1986

Photos; nineteenth-century family documents including letters, certificates of residency, marriage documents, and a simicha; proposal for documentary by Patricia Rife on the development of the first atomic bomb.Patricia RifeEdith Broch WeiszLise Meitner was a prominent physicist whose work with Otto Hahn from 1917-1938 laid the groundwork for human-controlled atomic fission. She was born, raised, and educated in Vienna, where she was the second woman to receive a doctorate from the University of Vienna. She moved to Berlin after obtaining the degree and became acquainted with Max Planck and Otto Hahn, with whom she had a long-standing professional partnership. In 1933 when Nazis gained control of the government, she was director of Chemistry at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, but she was soon forced to flee. Eventually she reached safety in Sweden via the Netherlands. She and Hahn met secretly in Denmark and continued their work during the 1930s.An inventory is available in the folderProcessed for digitization bydigitize

Lise Meitner: a life in physics

Lise Meitner (1878-1968) was a pioneer of nuclear physics and co-discoverer, with Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, of nuclear fission. Braving the sexism of the scientific world, she joined the prestigious Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry and became a prominent member of the international physics community. Of Jewish origin, Meitner fled Nazi Germany for Stockholm in 1938 and later moved to Cambridge, England. Her career was shattered when she fled Germany, and her scientific reputation was damaged when Hahn took full credit - and the 1944 Nobel Prize - for the work they had done together on nuclear fission. Ruth Sime's absorbing book is the definitive biography of Lise Meitner, the story of a brilliant woman whose extraordinary life illustrates not only the dramatic scientific progress but also the injustice and destruction that have marked the twentieth century