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My grandmother and grandfather come from Vienna, and so

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when I was studying physics, long long hours of physics,

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I came across this tiny, petite little

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woman who was born in 1887 or so.

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called Lise Meitner. And she was born in Vienna where my

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grandparents come from. And at that point in time when she was in

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high school, women weren't really let into physics

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classes, or really virtually any classes. But she kind of plowed

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her way through, she loved physics, she kept going,

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she got a PhD in physics, she talked to

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famous physics like Max Planck, and Max

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Planck thought that women shouldn't be in his classroom, but she convinced him that

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she should. So he let her in, and eventually she became his lab assistant.

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And Lise went on actually to

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discover one of the most critical areas in physics ever,

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which is what happens in the nucleus of an atom when

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it breaks apart. No one knew what was going on there. It was Lise

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Meitner and her colleague, whose name was Otto Hahn

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and they became great friends. He was a chemist, she was a physicist, so

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it's great to collaborate. They worked in the lab and worked in the lab,

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there were all these labs across the world trying to figure out this amazing

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problem. What is happening inside an atom?

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They didn't know is it disintegrating or breaking apart or what in the world

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is going on there? And she was one of the very first to realize

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that when you bombard an atom with neutrons, that

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E = mc^2 means that there is energy coming out

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when it actually breaks apart. So right around this time,

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Hitler came to power, 1933. And

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Lise Meitner's grandparents were Jewish. She stayed

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in Germany, but in 1938 or so

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she had to flee, and in fact Otto Hahn, her friend this

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chemist, he gave her his mother's wedding ring to bribe

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guards at the gates of Germany. And in fact she

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got out just in the nick of time, and she didn't have to use that

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diamond ring, she gave it back to her colleague, Otto Hahn. And

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she fled to the northern part of the country,

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to Sweden eventually. She set up lab there. They

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corresponded back and forth on this amazing problem.

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And she figured out that there was nuclear fission.

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Otto Hahn and she wrote a paper, one of two seminal papers,

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these two papers were read by physicists all over the world. And when Albert

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Einstein read this paper, he realized, he had

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fled Germany to the safety to America, and he realized that

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he better write the President of the United States at that time,

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Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and warned him that this could be useful

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as a nuclear weapon. So her paper

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motivated that. Einstein wrote the President,

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the Manhattan Project took place, America developed the bomb.

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All from Lise Meitner's work. So she was,

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she was a very compassionate person, she worked hard, she never

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complained, and she unlocked one of the mysteries of the universe.

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Her friend stayed her friend forever.

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She died and he died both about the age of

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90. and her tombstone says.

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"To Lise Meitner, a physicist who never lost her

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humanity." And that's why Lise Meitner is my most

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favorite physicist of any gender in the world.

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