The Path to Nuclear Fission The Story of Lise Meitner and Otto ... - VEA

The Path to Nuclear Fission – The Story of Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn
00:30:00 Lise tries to get a passport so she can leave Germany. Bohr and other scientists plan to help
her leave. She escapes by train to the Netherlands with another scientist’s help.
00:34:00 Travels to Stockholm to work in Siegbahn’s Institute. Isolated and unable to work here she
corresponds with Hahn about Irene Curies’ work in Paris. They meet at the Bohr Institute in
Copenhagen.
00:37:00 Hahn and Strassman try to prove they have thorium from the bombardment of Uranium as
they can’t believe it could possibly be Barium. Further tests show it is Barium and they
wonder how Uranium can produce Barium which is so much smaller. Turns to Meitner for
an explanation.
00:40:00 Spends Christmas with her nephew Frisch and they use Bohr’s idea that the nucleus is like a
drop of liquid that could separate in 2 to explain the Barium result. They add up the
products of the disintegration and there is something missing so they look at the energy in
the nucleus and Einstein’s prediction that E=mc2 and it all fits.
00:43:00 Hahn and Strassman publish their findings. Meitner and Frisch publish their explanation of
the findings and call it nuclear fission. Hahn doesn’t acknowledge the role of Meitner in
explaining his findings.
00:45:00 Germany invades Poland and WW2 begins. Fission bomb research begins in Germany,
Britain and America. The Manhattan project begins but although Meitner is invited to work
on it she declines and remains in Stockholm.
00:47:00 1945 and the war is over in Europe. Meitner writes to Hahn reproaching him for not
resisting the Nazis. Hahn says the German people are not to blame.
00:49:00 Hahn wins the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the fission discovery. He never acknowledges
the role of Physics. Bohr nominates Meitner and Frisch for a physics Nobel Prize but
Siegbahn prevents this.
00:52:00 Hahn heads the institute now known as the Max Planck Institute and is very famous. Lise is
less well known but their friendship continues until their deaths in 1968.
00:55:00 1982 Meitnerium made and named for Lise
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