Lise Meitner: A physicist’s story of grit, guts and loneliness
“Cities can be lonely places,” writes Olivia Laing, who says that in admitting this we see that “loneliness doesn’t necessarily require physical solitude, but rather an absence or paucity of connection, closeness, kinship: an inability, for one reason or another, to find as much intimacy as is desired.” For Lise Meitner, the physicist who discovered nuclear fission, the reason for her loneliness and lack of intimacy during the thirty-odd years she spent in Berlin is clear: her gender.
The year was 1907. Berlin was a symphony of science, art, music and military and Lise Meitner, thirty years old and full of dreams, travelled hundreds of miles from her hometown of Vienna to add her voice to the chorus.
To underestimate Lise Meitner’s resolution and grit would be naive, for Berlin’s academic community was cold and overwhelmingly male, unreceptive to accepting members of the opposite sex into the fold. She had extracted herself from the familiarity and warmth of her beloved Vienna and found herself an anomaly in a strange city. The feeling of being an oddity was visceral and Lise reacted with an intense shyness that she herself described as “bordering on fear of people”. It was as if she had been given the wrong score before a recital, the sense of eyes burning her back as she played an unfamiliar opus.
A lonely basement room was to be Lise’s domain for her first year at Friedrich-Wilhelm-Universitat, having been cast out by the Chemistry Institute’s head, Emil Fischer. She was not to set foot in the department, barred from entering those longed-for laboratories lest her hair catch alight from a flame gone awry. The fire of banishment burned for a year until Prussia opened its universities to women in 1908; it was only then that Fischer permitted her entry to the Institute. Many of the chemists resented the change and Lise was frequently ignored, a painful extension of her year-long ostracism. Whilst the universities were open, the fact remained: a woman scientist was a contradiction, unlikely to exist. Non-existence must have been a lonely state to occupy but perhaps it served to strengthen Lise’s grit: a conductor of sorts, guiding her intimate waltz with the study of physics.
Lise worked tirelessly with her research partner, Otto Hahn, a radiochemist from Frankfurt who would become a lifelong friend. The pair began their academic partnership by surveying all the beta-emitting radioactive sources at their disposal and by 1909 they had co-authored nine papers. Lise recalled Otto’s “joy in music” and in moments of lightness the scientist would sing Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, a pastime that must have delighted Lise who had a musical childhood and could often be found frequenting the music halls of Berlin, high up in the cheapest seats.
The early 1900s proved to be a revolutionary period in physics, with Berlin the star player. Besides Lise and Otto, key figures included Max Planck, the German theoretical physicist whom Lise greatly admired, and Albert Einstein, whose theory of relativity struck her as something “overwhelmingly new and surprising.” Later Lise would go on to describe the physics she experienced and the people who were part of it as a “magic musical accompaniment” to her life.
Whilst her friendships and passion for physics gave her satisfaction, Lise’s lonely non-existence endured. Despite often being at the centre of revolutionary events, she was pushed back towards the cheap seats through discriminatory practices and denied fair and formal recognition by her peers.
Otto would go on to win the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery of the fission of heavy atomic nuclei, Lise’s undeniably pivotal role in the interpretation of nuclear fission erased in the process. The scientific symphony droned on leaving Lise alone behind the curtains but the melody of Meitner’s mind could not be completely quashed. In 1997 chemical element 109 — meitnerium — was named after her. Search along the bottom row of a standard periodic table and you’ll find it: her legacy, her defiant note rising up in the scientific chorus.
