Physicist Lise Meitner’s brilliance led to the discovery of nuclear fission. But her long time collaborator Otto Hahn, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry without her in 1944, even though she had given the first theoretical explanation.
@Sheril Meitner's Nobel snub was terrible on so many levels.
For everyone who doesn't pay attention to the periodic table, she did get an element named after her (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meitnerium), though only after her death.
image description: Otto Hahn (left) and Lise Meitner (right) in 1912.
Both are wearing white lab coats and are standing by a bench in a laboratory. Otto looks down at something on the bench, Lise looks towards the camera.
To the left hand side are several pieces of lab equipment. Behind the scientists is a wall cabinet with shelves containing several labelled glass bottles.
That last information "She also adamantly refused to work on the atomic bomb during WWII."
Is the most important. If a larger portion of scientists had acted half as responsibly as she did, we would not be in the situation of "mutually guaranteed annihilation" that we have been in for 65 years.
@Sheril God created Eve to be world leaders. Eve was God’s perfect creation was happy and rested. Golden Ages were ruled by women. God made a mistake by giving Adam a dick along with a male ego riddled with jealousy therefore suppressing women for thousand of years. It took the year 2023 for Barbie to wake up and speak out. #wtf
I often wonder why there's so little recognition of the physicists who'd the level of skill to work on the Manhattan project but refused considering they must have considered the likelihood of blacklisting or career suicide.
It's like some minor but consistent conspiracy against those who said "Fuck that" to "Well if I don't do it someone else will" and go off to do the thing that will make things worse.
@Sheril "So he published without her, falsely claiming that the discovery was based solely on insights gleaned from his own chemical purification work and that any physical insight contributed by Meitner played an insignificant role"
History tells us scientists are human, and that they have human flaws. Such flaws are not limited to a particular point in history, and we have good reason to expect they continue to manifest. Particularly when it comes to whose name gets included on the paper.
Nobel prizes are a distraction. Attribution to this or that figure should not divert us from the content of the science. Nobel himself made a fortune from weapons manufacturing. It was probably only due his realization that history would remember him for how he made his pile, that we even have the Nobel prize.
@Sheril the look on her face like what else you going to steal Otto. Funny they even let women in the lab but they knew they weren’t smart enough and they could steal their ideas
@Sheril Nobel typically awards based on lab results, not theoretical research. Dr Lise Meitner figured out what Hahn (et al) had observed, but the discovery wasn't hers...
@JonKramer@Sheril That's not correct. Nobel prizes honor both confirmed theories and laboratory discoveries. Example: Peter Higgs won the Nobel Prize purely for his theoretical work, but it wasn't awarded until the Higgs boson was discovered.
@JonKramer@Sheril One thing that handicaps the theorists is that you have to be alive and your theory has to be confirmed. If the confirmation happens after your death, sorry, no Nobel. But for DNA, the lab work was by Rosalind Franklin and Watson and Crick were the theorists, and yet she was denied.
The other one that popped to mind was relativity and the photoelectric effect. The former made Einstein famous, the latter got him a Nobel. But ya, relativity wasn't solidly confirmed until well after his death, was it?
@JonKramer@Sheril I have read that there was a dispute about Eddington's data confirming general relativity (light bending measurement during a solar eclipse).
@not2b@Sheril when I look at those types of experiments, I am astounded, and have a hard time believing anyone got any credible results. Atmospheric refraction should have introduced so much noise in the data that the results were meaningless. But, they still did it. I would have loved to hear the arguments that went on before anything like that was accepted. But, I'm sitting here with the advantage of having seen confirmed photos of gravitational lensing, and several million transistors in my hand. They had three sticks, and a grandparent that discovered fire. It's astonishing.
Add comment