My grandmother and grandfather come from Vienna, and so
when I was studying physics, long long hours of physics,
I came across this tiny, petite little
woman who was born in 1887 or so.
called Lise Meitner. And she was born in Vienna where my
grandparents come from. And at that point in time when she was in
high school, women weren't really let into physics
classes, or really virtually any classes. But she kind of plowed
her way through, she loved physics, she kept going,
she got a PhD in physics, she talked to
famous physics like Max Planck, and Max
Planck thought that women shouldn't be in his classroom, but she convinced him that
she should. So he let her in, and eventually she became his lab assistant.
And Lise went on actually to
discover one of the most critical areas in physics ever,
which is what happens in the nucleus of an atom when
it breaks apart. No one knew what was going on there. It was Lise
Meitner and her colleague, whose name was Otto Hahn
and they became great friends. He was a chemist, she was a physicist, so
it's great to collaborate. They worked in the lab and worked in the lab,
there were all these labs across the world trying to figure out this amazing
problem. What is happening inside an atom?
They didn't know is it disintegrating or breaking apart or what in the world
is going on there? And she was one of the very first to realize
that when you bombard an atom with neutrons, that
E = mc^2 means that there is energy coming out
when it actually breaks apart. So right around this time,
Hitler came to power, 1933. And
Lise Meitner's grandparents were Jewish. She stayed
in Germany, but in 1938 or so
she had to flee, and in fact Otto Hahn, her friend this
chemist, he gave her his mother's wedding ring to bribe
guards at the gates of Germany. And in fact she
got out just in the nick of time, and she didn't have to use that
diamond ring, she gave it back to her colleague, Otto Hahn. And
she fled to the northern part of the country,
to Sweden eventually. She set up lab there. They
corresponded back and forth on this amazing problem.
And she figured out that there was nuclear fission.
Otto Hahn and she wrote a paper, one of two seminal papers,
these two papers were read by physicists all over the world. And when Albert
Einstein read this paper, he realized, he had
fled Germany to the safety to America, and he realized that
he better write the President of the United States at that time,
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and warned him that this could be useful
as a nuclear weapon. So her paper
motivated that. Einstein wrote the President,
the Manhattan Project took place, America developed the bomb.
All from Lise Meitner's work. So she was,
she was a very compassionate person, she worked hard, she never
complained, and she unlocked one of the mysteries of the universe.
Her friend stayed her friend forever.
She died and he died both about the age of
90. and her tombstone says.
"To Lise Meitner, a physicist who never lost her
humanity." And that's why Lise Meitner is my most
favorite physicist of any gender in the world.