← In Our Time
In Our Time
Lise Meitner
00:57:22
The Austrian-Jewish physicist who, in 1938, solved the question of nuclear fission.
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- [00:00]
Melvin Bragg
This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the uk.
- [00:06]
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- [00:39]
Lucy Worsley
It's Lucy Worsley here and we're back with a brand new series of lady swindlers. Join me and my all female team of detectives as we revisit the the audacious crimes of women trying to make it in a world made for men. These were women who traded in crime, but who were ahead of their time. History calls them criminals, society calls them frauds. But here on Lady Swindlers we call them ordinary women who lived extraordinary lives. And we're still talking about them today. Meet a a swindler with ever so many names.
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Annie Newbond
I am Annie Newbond.
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Anne Bruce Sutherland
Anne Bruce Sutherland. Annie Ogilvy Bruce.
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Annie Newbond
Madame le Baron de BEAUMAN STUART. I'm Mrs. Annie Ogilvie White.
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Anne Bruce Sutherland
Annie Frost.
- [01:34]
Annie Newbond
I am Mrs. Annie Gordon Bailey.
- [01:37]
Lucy Worsley
Or travel with us to 1920s New York to meet Celia Cooney, the bobbed haired bandit. A celebrity armed robber with a plan. Stick em up quick but deep down, all she really wants is her dream home. And you don't have to just take our word for it.
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Annie Newbond
We didn't call Celia the bob haired bandit. We called Celia Grandma.
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Lucy Worsley
This season we're chasing fake mediums, A lady burglar and the infamous Yorkshire witch from England and Scotland to the US and beyond. Our lady swindlers are truly international. She moved from Scotland to England to Italy later to New York to New Zealand and Australia. As always, we're traveling back in time with our in house historian, Professor Rosalind Crone. And we'd even come up with our own criminal nicknames. Cunning Crone, Luce the Noose, Luta Lucy and Robber Roz.
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Melvin Bragg
No bad ideas. Not all of them can be gone.
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Lucy Worsley
Our guest detective team is expanding too. This season we're joined by broadcasters, barrister authors, activists, a psychologist and even an artist.
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Melvin Bragg
Actually, I was always fascinated by England.
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Annie Newbond
I don't know, it might have to do with Hugh.
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Lucy Worsley
Granted, yes it did.
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Melvin Bragg
Four Weddings and a Funeral.
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Annie Newbond
Iconic.
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Lucy Worsley
We tried to understand these women.
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Annie Newbond
This is a story of working class women trying to get by.
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Melvin Bragg
This is survival.
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Lucy Worsley
We relate to them.
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Annie Newbond
I'm here shining up my fraudulent damehood.
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Melvin Bragg
I started getting abuse online for having accepted a demod, which is the ultimate mark of authenticity.
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Lucy Worsley
Join me for the second season of Lady Swindlers, where true crime meets history with a twist. Available now listen on the BBC app or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Melvin Bragg
BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts.
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David Dimbleby
This is in our time from BBC Radio 4 and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find on BBC Sounds and on our website. If you scroll down the page for this edition, you find a reading list to go with it. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello. Over Christmas 1938, the physicist Lise Meitner, a Jewish Austrian refugee from Nazi Germany, solved the question of nuclear fission. It said. She was sitting on a log in Sweden at the time on a snowy walk with her nephew Otto Frisch. Others had already broken uranium into the smaller atom barium, but couldn't explain their findings. Was the larger atom bursting or the smaller atom being chipped off, or something else? They turned to Meitner. She deduced the nucleus was splitting like a drop of water, something previously thought impossible, and named this fission. In all, a crucial breakthrough for which she was eventually widely recognized, but not as we'll hear at first. With me to discuss Lise Meitner are Jess Wade, a Royal Society University Research Fellow and Lecturer in Functional Materials at Imperial College London, Frank Close, Professor Emeritus of Theoretical Physics and Fellow Emeritus at Exeter College, University of Oxford, and Stephen Bramwell, Director of the London center for Nanotechnology and professor of Physics at University College London. Jess Lyssa Meitner was born in 1878 in Vienna. Can you tell us something about her early life?
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Annie Newbond
Yeah, fantastic. She was born to a Jewish father, actually, who was one of the first Jewish lawyers to be registered in Austria. She was one of eight children and she grew up in this incredibly liberal, free thinking household where she was encouraged amongst her brothers and sisters to go and pursue higher education. All of the children went to pursue higher education, including, including five daughters, four of whom went on to get PhDs. So they were incredibly committed to raising children who were really strong in academia. She was always passionate about science, grew up doing her own experiments, had a little science logbook that she kept underneath her pillow to document observations that she made about the world around her.
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David Dimbleby
At the age of 10.
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Annie Newbond
At the age of 10. So you could see her commitment, but actually recognized that she may not be able to achieve the things that she wanted to in science, in academia because of the restrictions placed on women at the time. So completed via some private tuition exams or training to be able to complete exams to be able to get into university, but also undertook training to become a teacher. If she couldn't pursue those ambitions she had in the sciences. So very forward thinking, very, very ambitious scientifically, very, very creative, but not sure about what future it could hold for her because she was a woman.
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David Dimbleby
To go back a few sentences on what you said, which is what opportunities were there in Austria and Germany for someone who wanted. For a woman who wanted to be a scientist.
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Annie Newbond
I suppose Lise Meitner came at this really interesting time because everything was changing, you know, in the late 1800s, I think 1897, Austria allowed women to go to university. It took a few years after that for them to be able to go and study medicine and the sciences. Lise Meitner entered university in 1901, actually after undergoing some private tuition and completing an exam at the boys school. So she had to go and do an exam at the boys school to be able to get in. Of the people who passed that exam, of the girls who passed that exam, there were four out of 13 of them who took the exam. She ended up going to university in the University of Vienna to study physics, doing a PhD. She was only the second woman physicist to earn a PhD at the University of Vienna. So there were a lot of barriers to women being able to progress their scientific careers, but she was at the right time for that transition starting to happen. So she eventually managed to get her degree and get her PhD at the University of Vienna, but almost every room she went into, she was one of a handful, if not the only woman, and treated differently as a result of it. And you saw it throughout her scientific career. Whilst her contemporaries were allowed to practice science, be paid salaries to practice science, she was eventually let into these spaces, allowed to be a scientist, but not paid properly, eventually paid a little bit, but not recognised, not respected properly. So she had immense prowess. She was obviously phenomenally bright, very gifted in mathematics, built this reputation on how brilliant she was. But there are a lot of institutional barriers that at the time weren't ready to accept women. When she went on to work with Planck, when she eventually got to Germany, he was very, very surprised that a woman would want to come and study these types of things, would only let her in originally to audit the lectures that he was giving to the community. Max Planck had recently won a Nobel Prize, but had done huge amounts of work in the early 1900s on discovering quantum theory. So that was all happening at the beginning of the 1900s when Lise Meitner was learning physics with Boltzmann. She then got to Germany met Planck and had this huge revelation about how much physics was working and evolving and developing during that time. And eventually Planck employed her as an assistant in 1912, and then she was the first woman professor of physics in 1926.
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David Dimbleby
Do we know how she stood up to this? Constantly being rebuffed one way or another?
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Annie Newbond
I think she stood up for it by stood up to it by just being incredibly resolute and headstrong and brilliant. You know, she found ways. She befriended a lot of these people. I think she had huge interpersonal skills when she got to Germany and worked under Planck. And Planck eventually paid her a salary, but there were all these times when she was either not paid at all or was only paid half of what she should have been. The thing I find most amazing about it is until her father died in 1910, he was responsible for paying her salary entirely. So her father had to maintain her abilities to be able to study and work in the sciences.
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David Dimbleby
Thank you, Frank Close. What was the understanding of the atom in the early 20th century, when Meitner was still studying?
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Melvin Bragg
Well, as Jesse intimated, Lise Meitner arrived in science at a time great change. At the end of the 19th century, chemistry was an established science. The idea that everything was made of elements was well established. And the idea that elements, the smallest piece of an element, is an atom and that the atom is indivisible, it's permanent, it's unchanging, that all the atoms of a particular element are identical and that you could rate the atoms in relative order of masses. Mendeleev had got a periodic table. The idea that the hydrogen atom at number one is the lightest, right the way up to uranium at number 92, the heaviest naturally occurring one, and into this world. The discovery of radioactivity in 1896 really threw the spanner in the works, metaphorically, in that atoms of uranium were discovered to spontaneously emit radiant energy, radioactivity, without apparently changing. And it became clear that this had been going on without stimulus for as long as uranium had existed, you know, millions, billions of years, which itself was astonishing. The curies then discovered that other elements are radioactive. They discovered radium and polonium. Radium was so active that it would glow in the dark. And the calculations that they did showed that if you had a piece of radium about the size of a pea, the amount of energy locked in the atoms somehow, if you could access it would be enough to drive a ship across the Atlantic, which was astonishing.
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David Dimbleby
That's amazing. While we recover from that.
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Melvin Bragg
Yes. Also we might have to wait 100 years to get across, because the problem was that this radioactivity was just dribbling out. It had been doing it for billions of years. But could you speed it up? Well, the first question was, what is it? Where is it coming from? And so forth. So that was the world into which Lise Meitner arrived. The fascination with radioactivity and indeed the work of Marie Curie, was one of the inspirations for her. And it was that that brought her eventually to Berlin, where she met Otto Hahn, with which her research career began.
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David Dimbleby
What did he do?
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Melvin Bragg
Otto Hahn was a chemist. He was, within a few months, the same age as Lise Meitner. He had been studying, among others, with Ernest Rutherford, trying to understand radioactivity. He had discovered some other radioactive elements. He thought they were. And then he met Meitner. He was in Berlin as a chemist. And the physicists were more enthusiastic about this radioactivity phenomenon than the chemists were.
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David Dimbleby
Why?
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Melvin Bragg
Well, it was very subtle. I mean, Hahn was able to detect the presence of things by the radiation they were emitting. But many of the chemists at that time, they would only believe that you got something if you could weigh it or at the very least, smell it. The idea that this person could detect it by radiations, it was like charlatan as far as they were concerned, whereas the physicists were, let's say, more adventurous. And so he started going to the physics lectures. And that is where he met Meitner as one of the students. And she struck him as very enthusiastic and also skillful. And he realized that the two of them together, he the chemist and she trained in physics and interested in radioactivity, could perhaps combine and start investigating what is this radioactive phenomenon, what is giving rise to it, what can we learn about it? And that's how they began in 1907, I think it was.
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David Dimbleby
What did they learn that led on?
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Melvin Bragg
Well, over a series of, well, the immediate next few years, but over the next decades, I think they're the people who probably established what I would call the radioactive ladder. I mean, uranium was the heaviest naturally occurring element, which was at number 92, if you like. Lead, the heaviest stable element, is at number 82. The discoveries by the curies of radium and polonium were somewhere in there. And it was Hahnem Meitner who, by studying radioactive decays, were able to establish the chain of order. Uranium decaying into maybe thorium, down through polonium and radium, ending up as lead. This ladder, they established there were two types of radioactive alpha and beta. The Alpha shifted, you two places at a time. So 92 to 90 to 88 through the even numbers, beta shifted you one. It took you from an even to an odd and tumbled down to bismuth. But one of the things that's becoming clear from this is that radioactivity changes one element into another. The atoms are not permanent, existing things. They themselves somehow change. So they, they established the ladder of radioactivity. And now the question was, what is causing this? What is going on inside the atom that can enable this energy to be emitted? And where in the atom is this energy stored?
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David Dimbleby
Before we go on, Stephen, Stephen Brammer, can you explain to the listeners and to me the difference between the chemist's approach to the atom and the. Than the physicist approach?
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Anne Bruce Sutherland
Yeah. So the chemists, as Frank has already mentioned, had the concept of chemical elements and that had become associated with particular atoms. But this revolution in physics that was going on was showing that it was more complicated than that. So an atom of uranium, say, can also have what we now call different isotopes, which are different masses, but the same chemical properties. And so the basis of chemistry was evolving at this point, and the understanding of the physics of the atom was also evolving. And to do this sort of research, you needed both physics and chemistry. So you needed to detect the radiation to understand the processes that were going on, but you also needed chemistry to isolate different parts of your material sample, to sort of isolate the radiation in a certain place, and then you could study it. And this is very complicated work. I mean, Frank's described this ladder of radioactive decays. And it's complicated because as uranium goes down this ladder, for example, some isotopes are long lived, some are short lived. Sometimes the radiation builds up, sometimes it goes away. You have to intervene and do a bit of chemistry, some quite complex chemistry, to separate out your different types of atom. And I think one thing to recognize here is that you need both physics and chemistry to do this. You have to have them working together and at the same time, because both the basis of physics and chemistry are changing. It's not very clear to anyone. Is this physics or is it chemistry? Is it both? Is it neither? And so one thing I think that to me illustrates that dilemma quite a lot is that Rutherford, of course, who was Fame, you know, is extremely famous physicist, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry, not in physics, which amused him because he knew he wasn't a chemist and he felt what he'd done was physics. But I think it just goes to show that it was hard to classify this kind of research. And Very hard to put in a box.
- [17:08]
Melvin Bragg
Can I just add something to what you're saying there? Because I made it sound very simple. Uranium's at number 92, lead's at 82. There's just 10 in there. There's 10 chemical elements in there. But what Hahn and Meitner found, as Steve sort of alluded to, was, was there were lots of different radioactive sources in there. And that's what gave rise to the idea of isotopes, which, this is maybe more Steve's area. But a given chemical element can have different radioactive behaviors.
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David Dimbleby
How did mitronite discover a new atomic element?
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Anne Bruce Sutherland
Yeah, so this is a particularly interesting story because when chemists developed the periodic table in the 1860s and 1870s, the work of Mendeleev, they arranged the elements according to what was clearly became the mass of the atom, but also their chemical properties. But they left gaps in the periodic table. And it gradually became clear that there were elements to be discovered in these gaps. And it became a bit of a sport to discover a new element and fill in the gap in the periodic table. Now, one of these gaps was element 91, which is just to the left of uranium. And two spaces to the left of that you have actinium. Actinium is a radioactive element that is found in uranium deposits. But no one knew how you got from uranium to actinium. But it became clear from, as Frank was saying earlier, alpha particle emission moves you two spaces to the left.
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Melvin Bragg
So.
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Anne Bruce Sutherland
So it became clear that actinium was coming from the unknown element 91 that nobody had ever seen. So Meitner and Hahn decided to plunge into this game and try and find the mother substance of actinium. This is a very bold thing to do because this was really being competitive with the best groups in the world at that time. And it also involved experiments that would take years to complete because there was weak radioactivity. They had to wait for other sources of radioactivity to die down and then they could do their chemistry. So they set up these long term experiments. And then the first World War started. Hahn signed up as a soldier. Meitner initially signed up as an X ray operative, but didn't have much to do. So she came back to the lab. The lab was very empty at this point. The young men were either at war or they were working on military projects. So she pretty much on her own, just, she did all the physics, she did all the chemistry, some very hard chemistry that most physicists would not want to do. Hydrofluoric acid and this sort of stuff. Boiling concentrated sulfuric acid and this Sort of stuff. And she did things like procuring the earth from which you got the starting products. He occasionally came back from the front and joined in, but it was mainly her. And gradually she isolated the mother substance of actinium, this new element, element 91. She published it with Hahn. She properly recognized that he was involved, even though she'd done most of the.
- [20:21]
David Dimbleby
Work more than he did about her on many occasions.
- [20:24]
Anne Bruce Sutherland
Well, later on, when the tables returned, it wasn't so straightforward, but they called it protactinium, the mother substance of actinium, and they're nowadays recognized as the discoverers of that element.
- [20:37]
David Dimbleby
Thank you, Jess. Jess Wade, why was this thought to be such an enthralling, exciting time for Meitner and for science in general?
- [20:45]
Annie Newbond
Well, I suppose for Meitner, it's easy. She absolutely loved this. She was born to do this. She was a brilliant physicist, a brilliant mathematician, and, as we've just heard, a brilliant chemist. So it was the perfect time in history for her to be. But because so many exciting things were happening in physics and in chemistry, we were populating the periodic table. There was the development of atomic theory, so many Nobel Prizes being given to understanding atomic structure. There was the beginning of quantum physics, the development of electromagnetic theory. There was so much going on in science to be excited about.
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David Dimbleby
So many fine scientists. Could you give us a few more?
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Annie Newbond
So many fine scientists in the same place. I mean, Berlin seemed to be this hotspot of Einstein, of Planck, of Niels Bohr, of Lise Meitner, of Nernst, of Laue, discovering these X ray interference fringes. And they had these colloquia on a Wednesday which attracted the biggest names in physics from all around the world to come and give talks. And I think that probably continuously inspired her to think in these different directions and be always curious, always creative in the approach that she took to trying to decipher these really tricky problems. Rutherford came on the way back from giving his Nobel Prize lecture in Stockholm and came back through Berlin, gave one of these Wednesday colloquia when he was very surprised to find Lise Meitner was a woman because he'd read all of her work thinking Lisa was probably a man's name. But it was through these that she managed to build these social connections with physicists as well. You know, she became great friends with Niels Bohr, great friends with Max Planck. When Niels Bohr first came to give his series of lectures, and he'd go on to win a Nobel Prize later for atomic structure, all of the young, early career scientists of which Lise Meitner was one in the audience, felt very silly, felt they didn't understand anything, felt he was speaking a different language because his science jargon was different to their science jargon. Five of these early career scientists went on to win Nobel Prizes. So they were truly brilliant. But they got together and said, actually, can we invite Niels board to do a special day for early career people to come out and explain this science to us? So they had a special meeting, this workshop. They called it the Meeting without the Bigwigs. So that was the formal title of this occasion, where they just got to ask questions to Niels Bohr about science and make sure they understood it. So I think it was a fantastic time for science because so many discoveries were happening where even though you had to be technically brilliant, you didn't need massively complicated scientific equipment to get it going. But also there was this kind of movement of great ideas through a system that allowed them to continuously be inspired.
- [23:10]
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- [23:18]
Anne Bruce Sutherland
We had a responsibility so that the.
- [23:21]
Melvin Bragg
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- [23:24]
Bill Walton
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- [23:55]
David Dimbleby
Frank, let's come back to you. How is she earning the respect of her peers so early on?
- [24:01]
Melvin Bragg
She was very careful and precise, and if she came out with an experimental result, people regarded that as most likely being correct. She was also very good at using apparatus and recognizing opportunities in novel ways. And the two examples of this are with what's called the beta radioactivity and gamma radioactivity. Beta particles are emitted by nucleus. Einstein's famous equation E was MC squared. Says, if you've got a nucleus with a mass M, it's got an amount of energy E trapped in there somehow. And what radioactivity was understood as was you start off with a nucleus with a certain amount of energy, and it stabilizes by giving up some of that energy into the beta particle and ending up as another nucleus with a different energy. Now, if that was the whole story, the beta particle each and every time would carry off the precise amount of energy. Difference between the starting and the finishing experiments have begun to show that it looked as if this wasn't quite the case, but people didn't really believe it until Meitner showed very clearly by careful measurements, that indeed, from one experiment to the next, the beta particle energy would vary a little bit, sometimes a little bit more, sometimes a little bit less. But it was quite clear that there's a distribution. And this led the great Austrian theorist Wolfgang Pauli to come up with the explanation that in beta radioactivity there's not one particle emitted, there are two. There's the beta particle that you're able to detect, but it's accompanied by a ghostly neutral thing which he called the neutrino. And we had a program on this many years ago that you can all now go and listen to. And that was because of Meitner's careful results that convinced him that this must be the case. And we now know indeed that was correct. The gamma experiments are interesting. Gamma rays are very high energy forms of light. Well, she was studying the beta decay spectra in great care, and an assistant said he was having great difficulty because he was using a Geiger counter, a good old Geiger counter which clicks when radiation comes past. And the problem was that somewhere in the laboratory there was a source of gamma rays which were causing the Geiger counter to click, making so much clicking that he actually couldn't do the experiment he wanted to. Now, whereas you or I might say, well, that's a problem, you know, get rid of. The source might have thought, well, that's interesting. If the gamma radiation is causing the Geiger counter to click, we could use a Geiger counter to measure gamma radiation. And that's what she did. And she did the starting studies on gamma radioactivity of nuclei. And so this is the 20s, 30s, really established the whole details of the alpha, beta and gamma radiation emitted by various nuclei, mapping the whole landscape out, eventually leading to the understanding of what the atomic nucleus is and how it all works.
- [27:00]
David Dimbleby
Stephen, who were the people who were recognizing her? How. Who brought her on, as it were?
- [27:06]
Anne Bruce Sutherland
Well, after the discovery of protactinium, which is sort of around 1918, she got her own laboratory in Berlin where she worked and was head of the physics laboratory for radiation studies. And this is where she was. She was now independent of Hahn. This is where she launched the very careful studies of beta radiation that Frank's already described. And it was really in that period where the precision of her measurements and the care which she took to interpret them theoretically according to the latest theories of the day really started to put Berlin on the map, which hadn't really been on the map before in this sort of research. The theorists of the day, Frank's, given the example of Wolfgang Pauli, really started to pay attention to what she was doing and the very careful results. This was not an environment in which you could just sit and theorise. You had to benchmark your theories against experiment.
- [28:08]
Melvin Bragg
And also it comes across now with hindsight, as it's all straightforward, but there's a lot of confusion. You know, not everybody's experimental results are right. How do you know which ones to believe, which ones to give more emphasis to? And I think that is really what she was contributing.
- [28:23]
Anne Bruce Sutherland
Yes, yes, absolutely. And you see it, you see it time and again that they, they really look closely at what she's doing and what she's contributing. And so maybe just to emphasize back on the neutrino, that was a sort of mini crisis, wasn't it, in physics, in that people like Bohr even started to suggest maybe the physicists cherished concept of energy conservation may not be true inside the atom, but it was true. But that wasn't the right explanation. But the fact that they were building theories around her experiments rather than other people's experiments really showed in what esteem she was held. And the other thing that perhaps I could just slip in is that in that period of her careful studies of beta radiation, she discovered a few other things as well. So she discovered an effect which was actually later named after French physicist Auger. It's called the Auger effect, although nowadays it's increasingly called the Auger Meitner effect, because Magner actually got there first. And this is an effect where you get electrons coming off the atomic, the so called secondary electrons. It produces low energy electrons that are used in cancer therapy today. It's an important effect. And she actually discovered quite a few other things. If you drill down, you discover a lot of common things in physics textbooks were actually discovered by Meitner in this period through a careful experimentation.
- [29:56]
David Dimbleby
Just wade to talk about her life while this is going on, while her work is going on. It was in danger in the 1930s. Hitler had come to power and although she could call herself a Protestant, nevertheless they went after her. She was under a lot of pressure. How did she cope?
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Annie Newbond
I think after 1933 her life changed quite dramatically. Her teaching rights were revoked and there were some of her students in the classes and researchers who joined the Nazi party and made it very obvious they did. So it changed completely in 1938 when Austria were annexed, because she was no longer protected by her Austrian nationality. But actually she was just now a Jew in Germany. Other countries wouldn't take her in because her Austrian passport wasn't recognized anywhere. But actually it was this network of incredibly powerful and well connected physicists who conceived this international operation to be able to smuggle her out of Germany at all. Hahn became increasingly worried about her working with him to the extent that eventually, in 1938, it changed. Niels Bohr actually was quite influential and massively important in getting her out. How did he eventually, speaking to another chemist called Costa, who was in the Netherlands and managed to coordinate her passage out on a series of trains from Berlin. You know, now you read it through and it's this kind of international heist. She had to be prepared to leave at 8pm at night. She was in her. You know, she was approaching 60 at the time. She had to have her stuff packed in a suitcase. She was given an engagement ring in case she needed to bribe someone on border security. She had all of these papers. Costa had negotiated with local politicians and officials that should have a passage out of Berlin, eventually into the Netherlands, and eventually she ended up in Stockholm. But there are loads of descriptions of this time, of her being absolutely terrified of that journey for completely obvious reasons of getting out, eventually landing in Stockholm and being completely afraid that she was going to start to be written out of this incredibly important time in physics and in history. Hahn became concerned that if he was seen to be publishing with a Jew, that would impact his life as well as his scientific career. And so actually, over this transition, once she had made that safe passage out, she started being left off papers. So once, whilst originally they'd been collaborating and she'd been very generous putting him on these papers, she started being left off all of these incredibly important papers because she was a Jew and they were absolutely terrified about including her on there.
- [32:14]
David Dimbleby
Do you want to comment on the student?
- [32:16]
Anne Bruce Sutherland
Yeah, yeah. Perhaps I could just also add something there that after the war, with the benefit of hindsight, she was somewhat angry with herself for not having left Germany earlier. So Einstein left, I think, was it 1933 when Hitler came to power? But Meitner, she was so absorbed in her science, she kind of thought she could hang on in there. And she was upset with herself after the war for sort of dignifying the Nazi regime by staying. And also the sort of persecution of scientists happened almost immediately. Hitler came to power and when Germany later took over Austria, there was particularly awful persecution in Vienna, where Meitner was from. So, you know, scientists really were in danger of their lives. And as Jess has described Meitner was terrified and with good reason, but absolutely loved her physics.
- [33:07]
Annie Newbond
You know, there are letters from her at the time saying, I just can't imagine what I'd do if I wasn't doing physics. I love it so much. So, so incredibly difficult balancing the one thing that was keeping her going in life with this absolute fear for her own life.
- [33:18]
David Dimbleby
Yeah, Frank. Frank. Klaus. It's a lot to fit in a small space, but in one sense, we're talking about the smaller spaces, aren't we? So let's you have a go here and I can listen. Can you tell us how scientists knew they could get barium out of uranium even if they couldn't explain their findings?
- [33:39]
Melvin Bragg
Probably not, but that's the chemist's answer. But what was happening was that the story really began a few years earlier with Enrico Fermi in Italy, who was bombarding atoms of elements in the periodic table with neutrons to see what happens. And what Fermi was wanting to do was to fire these neutrons gently enough that they would attach to the nucleus and then modify it and form perhaps radioactive forms, which he succeeded in doing. He worked his way up the periodic table and he was firing neutrons at uranium, the heaviest naturally occurring element, in the hope perhaps, that he might be able to create an element beyond uranium. Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, uranium, neptunium, plutonium, the transuranic elements. And in his results, he found some very strange things that the chemists were not able to explain, given the knowledge that they had. And he then assumed that this was evidence that he had indeed, for the first time, produced these transuranic elements. And that is indeed what he won the Nobel prize for in December 1938, very ironically, because it was that very same month that actually the real explanation of what he had done became clear. And that was that the neutron, when it hits uranium, has broken it into two. Which might sound trivially obvious, but actually, given everything that people knew about the nucleus at that time, was effectively supposed to be impossible because the nucleus was very strongly glued together. And the only thing that we knew for sure, thanks to Hahn and Meit in particular, was that when you modified a nucleus, it moved maybe one place or maybe two places down the periodic table, but that was it. But the chemical analysis that Hahn did showed that he was getting barium when he repeated the experiments. Now barium is down number 40. Something halfway down the periodic table made no sense whatsoever. And he couldn't understand this at all. And he wrote to Meitner, who, as we've heard by then, had left Germany, and she was in Stockholm and she was visited over the Christmas by her nephew Otto Frisch, who had also escaped from Nazi Germany. And they would all get together at Christmas time. So this time he met her in Sweden and she showed him this letter that she'd received from Hahn in which he said that he had found barium in the results. What could this mean? And the first reaction was, well, this makes no sense at all. But she said, look, Hahn is a great chemist. If he says he's seeing barium, he's seeing barium, what can it possibly mean? And the two of them then walked through the woods, snow shoeing and so forth, and sat down and had a coffee break or something like that. And in this they had this insight that the picture of the atomic nucleus as like a liquid drop, where surface tension would stop it breaking. There was one extra feature a nucleus has which a liquid drop doesn't, and that is electric charge. And they suddenly. And whether it was Meitner or Frisch has never been established. But they had the insight that if, when the neutron hits this liquid drop, it elongates slightly, so it's like a dumbbell. The two ends of the dumbbell are each positively charged, and like charges repel that could then push those two ends apart, making the nucleus. Fission is the word that became known into two, which would explain why things like barium halfway down the periodic table appear, because that's roughly half of a uranium nucleus. And so that, in my mind, is the moment when nuclear fission was discovered, that Frisch and Meitner had the insight. They did the calculation and they found that the energy produced out of this, it fitted everything that you would expect. It turns out that Hahn, his discovery of barium in the production, which has always subsequently given him the credit for discovering fission, had actually, three months earlier, Marie Curie's daughter Irene in Paris had found pretty much the same phenomenon. She had found lanthanum, which is also down there and couldn't make sense of it, but that was it. So then, three months later, Hahn does the same thing, doesn't understand it, but he writes a letter to Meitner and Meitner explains it. So to my mind, fission was discovered on a tree stump in a wood in Stockholm.
- [38:19]
David Dimbleby
Stephen?
- [38:20]
Anne Bruce Sutherland
Yes, I agree completely with what Frank said. Just wanted to make it even a bit stronger. So Hahn's first paper was very, very tentative. And they just say, this is mysterious, right? We know this. This may not be right. We may have been misled somehow. And then Meitner has sent her paper to Hahn. Now, the Next paper Hahn publishes, which is after the Meitner Frisch one. He's incredibly confident, though, that what he discovered implied that the nucleus had split in half. But science doesn't work that way. You know, it's not true that he discovered.
- [39:01]
Melvin Bragg
Steve mentioned the timing. It's quite remarkable.
- [39:03]
Anne Bruce Sutherland
Yeah.
- [39:03]
Melvin Bragg
That Fermi was getting the Nobel Prize in, like, the second week of December for supposedly discovering transuranic elements, but we now realize he had probably actually fissioned the uranium, but not realize the fact. And then it's three weeks later.
- [39:17]
Anne Bruce Sutherland
Yeah.
- [39:17]
Melvin Bragg
That Hahn is writing this letter to Meitner and it all being sorted out.
- [39:21]
Anne Bruce Sutherland
Absolutely. And the Meitner Frisch paper, it's a short paper and it's really lucid and a really enjoyable read. As a scientist, Great paper. Right. And it makes sense of everything. Whereas the first Town paper is just confusing.
- [39:40]
David Dimbleby
Can we switch a bit here, Jess? Within months, Otto Frisch, who'd been sitting on a stump of wood in Sweden, was in Birmingham sketching out plans for an atom bomb. What it might now realize would flow from that.
- [39:55]
Annie Newbond
Well, I suppose the unfortunate part of their discovery, it came right before the Second World War. So it was a time when science was being weaponized in this way. Meitner, I think, realized the potential. I think scientists all around the world realized the potential if you could release this immense amount of nuclear energy, the damage that would do. Meitner and Hans experiments, I suppose, showed that it was possible to do that. Meitner was incredibly devout in physics being used for good. I mean, lots of the earlier isotopes that her and Han had discovered were used for medical applications. She realized the huge implications of this as an energy generation source, you know, and she was very passionate that would happen. She was invited to be part of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. So to contribute to this discovery, this building of an atomic bomb, and absolutely refused to be part of it. So as soon as she wouldn't have.
- [40:42]
David Dimbleby
Anything whatsoever to do with.
- [40:43]
Annie Newbond
She wouldn't have anything whatsoever to do with making a bomb. Even afterwards, when I think movie producers came to talk to her about making a film about making an atomic bomb, she said, absolutely not. I'm not even contributing or consulting on your film script. And she said, I'd sooner walk naked down Broadway than I would contribute to this. So she was headstrong in her capacity to think physics should be used as a force for good, not a force for evil. And maybe it came from her earlier experiences of being in the First World War and seeing the impacts of death and loss around her and really not Wanting to be part of that. She always had faith throughout her entire life. And she devoutly believed that science should contribute good to the world, not harm.
- [41:22]
David Dimbleby
Stephen Otto Hahn was to get the Nobel Prize for chemistry for fission in 1944. Why not Meitner?
- [41:29]
Anne Bruce Sutherland
Well, it's a very good question and I think there were several reasons. First of all, the obvious reason, the fact that she was a woman in the world as it was at that time, as one of the biographers put it, the grim realities of society, the came in. But I think there were other reasons as well. One of them was back to this old chemistry versus physics thing. So a prize was given by the chemistry committee to Hahn. He won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for, quote, the discovery of nuclear fission. There was clearly some sort of disciplinary bias going on there. It was really just a very bad call by the Nobel committee. They hadn't researched it terribly. Carefully. They downplayed the physics aspect of it. It was just before Hiroshima, I think.
- [42:15]
Melvin Bragg
Yeah, well, I think first of all, the thing about Meitner being a woman, there had been Nobel Prizes given to Marie Curie, Irene Curie and others. The fact that she was Jewish. Well, there were also prizes given to people who were Jewish, but I think had she not been Jewish, she would not have had to have left Berlin and she would have been there with Hahn and there'd have been no debate about it whatsoever.
- [42:35]
Annie Newbond
And been there on the papers.
- [42:36]
Melvin Bragg
Absolutely. But the data is a thing. Correct me, it's rather strange that it was indeed the chemistry prize that Hahn got, but it was backdated. And in 1945 no chemistry prize was awarded. In 1946, it's awarded to Hahn for fission and backdated. And I presume it's because in 1945 the experimental proof in quotation marks of fission was demonstrated in the atomic bombs, which is a horrendous thing. But why did Meit not get it is a very fair question. And I sort of feel that there are three possible ways you could imagine that prize for fission having been awarded. One is that it was awarded to Frisch and Meitner, who, in my opinion are the real discoverers explaining what had happened. The other possibility is that it would be given to Hahn and Meitner because they had worked together right through, and that the experiments that Hahn eventually did was, if you like, the tip of the iceberg on the whole work that he and Meitner had been doing for now, decades. And it was indeed Meitner who led to the explanation of it, or all three of them. Hahn, Meitner, And Frisch. But however you slice that particular cake, because the noble can only be given to a maximum of three, Meitner is there on each occasion.
- [43:56]
Anne Bruce Sutherland
Yeah, and maybe I could just add, I mean, there's a fourth name in all of this, which is Strassman, who is the person who worked with Hahn, who actually did the chemistry. So Strassman was the guy who did the chemistry. Strassman always confirmed that Meitner was the intellectual leader of the group. Now, personally, I would say that Hahn actually made the smallest contribution of those four. That's a bit of a Bango's my Nobel Prize there. But that's a bit controversial. But I mean, just back to the misogyny question. After the war, Meitner was treated terribly in certain areas. She was described as Han's assistant and this sort of thing, which was just utterly false.
- [44:37]
Melvin Bragg
And some newspaper article referred to her as the mother of the atomic bomb, which was awful on many scores. She said she had nothing to do with it and she would never have wanted to have anything to do with it.
- [44:45]
David Dimbleby
Jess Meitner, when she was working in. She worked in Sweden and in England. She's buried in England with the Epitaph. A physicist who never lost her humanity. Why does she want that epitaph?
- [44:56]
Annie Newbond
Well, maybe you can catch it from the sentiment everyone else is sharing about Meitner, but she had this immense morality. She was a victim of this huge injustice. She wasn't recognized for her scientific contributions. She was ostracized for being Jewish, ostracized for being a woman, and yet seemed to bear no resentment. You know, she got frustrated by the ways that she was treated in Berlin, but continued to do this brilliant physics. You know, Frank described the work of Fermi and that inspiring lots of this. Meitner was the one who read the work of Fermi and said to Han, we really need to start doing these experiments. So not only was she the one who devised this theory that could explain them, but she came up with the idea to do them in the first place. You could imagine that getting a lot of people quite angry. But she was just wondered by the discovery. So first and foremost, she's a physicist, right? She's a hardcore physicist, but she never lost her humanity within that. She, she campaigned for physics, as I mentioned before, to be used as this force for good. She was involved in these missions alongside Iren Kiri for nuclear disarmament. She absolutely did not want physics getting into the wrong hands and being weaponized against it. So I suppose that's the humanity part, that despite everything that the world threw at her. She was committed to her science. She was a scientist throughout, you know, her entire life. She went over to give a series of lectures in America in the late 1940s and met President Truman and sat next to him at dinner. And together they both agreed that never again should these nuclear weapons be used in the way they had been. So she spread the that humanity around the world wherever she went.
- [46:19]
David Dimbleby
Well, thank you very much. Thanks to Jess Wade, Frank Close, and Stephen Branwell. Next week, the invention of copyright, the legal system that protects your work and stops others using it without permission. Thank you for listening.
- [46:33]
Annie Newbond
And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.
- [46:40]
David Dimbleby
Well, that was terrific. I understood some of it.
- [46:42]
Annie Newbond
It was great.
- [46:43]
David Dimbleby
Now, you can't go yet because we know that was really good. I loved it. You're so clear. We're going to do an extra bit for the podcast, as some of you will know. So, Frank, it was a great leap from Meitner's work to the atom bomb six years later. I'm sorry about this, but could you tell. Could you fill in those six years in about six minutes?
- [47:05]
Melvin Bragg
Well, six minutes. Oh, that's great. I feel like six seconds. Well, the first surprise, the most significant thing perhaps, was the calculation of fission that Frisch and Meitner did was the discovery that the amount of energy released out of the atom was vast compared to anything that radioactivity had released before, which in turn was millions of times bigger than chemical. So the fact that there was a huge amount of energy buried inside the atom, which fission could now release, was the first shock. But it's quite a long way from that to making a weapon. I mean, if you see the movie Oppenheimer, you get the impression that within minutes, Oppenheimer had got a diagram of a bomb on the board. And it wasn't at all like that, because, as Niels Bohr pointed out, that if uranium spontaneously can explode, then why isn't it all that uranium in the rocks that Steve was talking about early on isn't exploding around us all the time? And the insight that came initially with Bohr is that there are two particular isotopes of uranium one, the common one called uranium 238, and the uncommon one, uranium 235. Those numbers are the relative weights of the things. The 235 is the one that is potentially fissioning and leading to explosion, but that is only seven atoms in every thousand. So when fission happens, it's the 235 that has been hit. The idea of a chain reaction is that when you split that thing in two, maybe a couple of neutrons also spill off. And those two neutrons could now hit further uranium atoms and split them, liberating energy and further neutrons. But seeing as it's only the 235 that does the job, and it's so few of those around, the chances that you find another one is pretty small. Ironically, it seemed that nobody really asked the question, if somehow you could make Uranium235, how much would you need to make an explosion? And the people who asked that question were her nephew, Otto Frisch, now in Birmingham, and Rudolf Peils, two Jewish emigres working in Birmingham in 1940. And the shock that they had was that if you could have about a kilogram, about, yes, a few kilograms of uranium 235, you could make an explosion equivalent to a thousand tons of dynamite. It would emit lethal radiation. There would be no known defense against such a thing other than to have such a device yourself.
- [49:44]
David Dimbleby
All this is happening in Birmingham.
- [49:45]
Melvin Bragg
This is all happening in Birmingham. And it's an example of science. You put yourself in the position of these two Jewish emigres. They fled Hitler and they've done this calculation. And the moment you get the answer, everything is sort of obvious. And you think, has the Nazi scientists already had this insight? And the only defense against Hitler already building one of these things, and that will be the end of the war. And bear in mind the Battle of Britain is taking place at this very time. The chances that we're about to be defeated anyway is right there. The possibility that here is a device that could change. Change the nature of warfare. And I'm not overstating it, because indeed it did, and that we have to have this, if you like, Mutually Assured Destruction was invented at that moment of time. And that is what started the whole, initially called tube alloys project, to develop a way of enriching uranium to make pure uranium235, eventually leading to the development of the weapon in Los Alamos.
- [50:43]
David Dimbleby
Stephen. She was very good at complexity, I read. Yes. And she would crack things that others couldn't.
- [50:49]
Anne Bruce Sutherland
Yeah, I mean, she was very versatile. As Jess mentioned right at the start, she was a good mathematician. So one of the things in the paper is they calculated what they managed to produce. Well, they didn't actually show the calculation, but they reported that they'd done a calculation to show that the conditions under which the nucleus would split apart like a liquid drop. Now, this is quite a complicated calculation, actually. I mean, the history books tend to say, straightforward calculation. Actually, you have to know what you're talking about. The student will demonstrate that pretty hard, you know, because it involves, like, 19th century science with Lauder Alien and complicated maths, you know. But they did that. They were classy scientists. But one of the interesting things there is that they actually answered a question that they didn't really make much of. But, you know, you might have asked in the early 20th centuries, why are there only 100 or so elements? Why not a thousand, why not a million, why not a billion? And they provided the answer because they show if you go much beyond 100, then they naturally fall apart by fission.
- [51:57]
Melvin Bragg
There's so much electric charge they're pushing out, no longer hold together.
- [52:01]
David Dimbleby
What has the scientific community done to restore and enhance her reputation since her death?
- [52:06]
Anne Bruce Sutherland
Yeah, yeah. So since her death, not long after her death, a number of fantastic biographies came out. One by Ruth Lune Syne, one by Patricia Rife, and some others as well. And this started to change the dial a little bit, and it became recognized as an injustice and not getting the Nobel Prize. So, for example, in the 1980s, some German scientists, led by scientists called Peter Armbruster, discovered four new elements at the top of the periodic table. And they named one of them after Lise Meitner, partly to try and put things straight, to put the record straight. They were clear about that. She became, therefore, one of the few people who've had an element named after them, and actually the only woman who's had an element named just after her. The other, because Marie Curie has had Curiam named after her that's also named after Pierre Curie, her husband. So she's in a group of about a dozen people who've had an element named after them. The other thing that's happened since then, there's been a gradual rediscovery of Magner's contributions. So as I mentioned earlier, this auger effect, which is quite an important effect, is often now called the Auger Meitner effect. There's also some other effects that I counted, I think, four things that are now named after Meitner, and that number has increased in the last few years. So she's definitely. People have tried to put the record straight, especially scientists, because they recognize there's been an injustice.
- [53:38]
Annie Newbond
And there are buildings named after and prizes named after and big scientific fellowship schemes and awards. But I would say we still don't learn enough about her. If you think about undergraduate physics or maths lectures or certainly high school physics, you don't come across Lise Meitner's name.
- [53:51]
David Dimbleby
Yeah, Frank, why does she stand in the pantheon of nuclear scientists a lot? A very distinguished group? Where does she stand in that group?
- [53:59]
Melvin Bragg
Well, certainly she was responsible, I think, for establishing it all. Looks obvious now, looking back, but at the time, back in 1900, radioactivity had been discovered. It was a mess. And she forged the way through that, identified, as we said, the ladder of radioactivity, established which element created the radioactivity to lead to the next element and so forth. So created the whole landscape of radioactivity from which, after Rutherford had discovered the atomic nucleus, that the dynamics of the atomic nucleus, the rules that control how radioactivity happens, how the energy in a nucleus is contained and can be liberated, are all directly or indirectly, the results of the work that Meitner was doing over 20 or years or so, and the fact that she never got the Nobel Prize for fission we've discussed. I understand that she was nominated for the Nobel Prize about a score of the order of 20 times for physics and for chemistry, and never got it for either of them. In that sense, I think that, you know, for Nobel Prize runners up, she must really be there at the top.
- [55:19]
David Dimbleby
Jess, what didn't you get a chance to say, you'd like to have said.
- [55:23]
Annie Newbond
Probably that during this time in her early career, when she'd got to Berlin and she was not being paid properly in the beginning, not being paid at all, actually, and then being paid very little to keep her on, she was getting a lot of offers from all around the world to go and be a professor in all of these different universities. Everyone wanted to hire her. And then Planck and Fisher, who was the director of the chemistry institute that she was in, said, okay, we'll pay you, we'll keep you. We'll work really hard to keep you. Eventually, she got made a professor and became this magnet for talent coming from all around the world to work in this institution because of her reputation. But also her financial situation was changed by this discovery that her and Han made of a certain isotope, a thorium isotope that had incredible medical applications, from which they got about €400,000 of royalties in one year. So that was quite a lot of money, €400,000. And in his immense generosity, despite being her age and similar career stage, Han took 90% of the money that they got. She was given 10%. That was still a lot of money at the time. But despite this being a shared discovery, despite being him being her contemporary and her friend, it was seen at the time as okay, that he took 90% of it.
- [56:32]
Anne Bruce Sutherland
Yeah, yeah. We didn't revisit the point, actually, that when she worked alone, she credited Hahn early on for the discovery of protactinium. When she was absent, Hahn didn't credit. Even though it was her project.
- [56:49]
Melvin Bragg
Yes. You know, so I, I, I really would love to know more about the, the history of all of this because I had initially read somewhere indeed that, you know, the discovery of protactinium was Harle and Meitner's name was their second. But actually the first paper I was able to find on this was in her name alone, with the assistance of Archer Harm, which was sort of interesting in its way. But the fission paper, there is a story, and I don't know what the provenance of it is, that Hahn wanted to have both Meitner's seal of approval on the paper and that because she was in Sweden with Otto Frisch, that she didn't get this in time. And so he went ahead and published it under his own name anyway. But whether these things are people giving talks afterwards who then try to make themselves look better or not, I have no idea.
- [57:45]
Anne Bruce Sutherland
I don't think Hahn did anything terribly bad before the, I mean, he was in a difficult situation in Nazi Germany. But after, Well, I mean, if he'd given a lot of credit to Meitner as an ethnically Jewish woman, he'd have been in trouble with the Nazis.
- [58:02]
Annie Newbond
And put her life at risk.
- [58:03]
Anne Bruce Sutherland
And put her life at risk. Right. But after she'd left, I mean, when she was in Sweden. But I think where Hahn goes wrong is after the war. He does lots of great things after the war, especially for German science, but he never admits Meitner's role. And it's pretty obvious that that was bad behavior.
- [58:25]
Melvin Bragg
Hahn was certainly a complex character because you mentioned about the First World War. In fact, Hahn was one of the people involved in developing chemical warfare in the First World War. But to be fair to him, when he saw the effects, I think, on the Russian front, when it was done, that he then volunteered to be a guinea pig for gas masks to check. Indeed, if gas masks would protect you. So that was something that he did. Positive there. She, of course, worked with X rays and so forth, like Marie Curie and her daughter in the First World War as well. You realize, you know, X rays had been discovered only 20 years before and were now being used to X ray injured troops and so forth.
- [59:10]
Anne Bruce Sutherland
Yes. The other thing I think is worth thinking about in all of this is the role of the Nobel Prize prizes in, in that it's almost like they're, they're making history official that you can never quite get away from, you know, after that. So even biographers of Meitner who point to the injustice, they're still very reverential to the. The decision, this terribly bad decision of the Nobel chemistry Committee in 1944 or whenever it was. By the way, one thing I said, the neck, the year after Hahn got it, it for inexplicable reasons, they gave it to somebody for improving cattle fodder.
- [59:48]
Melvin Bragg
Which makes one wonder why it wasn't awarded the previous year.
- [59:52]
Anne Bruce Sutherland
Exactly. So it's a bit comical almost. But they, they, I think it. You get this impression the committee was not at its best in this period and they, you know, they were, they were maybe trying to dabble in politics a bit as well. They were maybe trying to rehabilitate German scientists, etc, the war as well.
- [60:10]
Melvin Bragg
I suppose one thing I probably should have said on there, which I would say on behalf of everybody who's actually had gamma radiation treatment for cancers and so forth, thank you to Liser Meitner for having really done those studies on gamma rays in nuclear physics. One of the benefits that have come out of it. But nuclear physics has done good things.
- [60:29]
Anne Bruce Sutherland
Yeah, absolutely.
- [60:30]
David Dimbleby
Well, thank you all very much. Thank you.
- [60:33]
Melvin Bragg
Ironically, on VE Day, it's my daughter's. It's my daughter's birthday.
- [60:39]
Anne Bruce Sutherland
Does anyone want tea or coffee?
- [60:40]
David Dimbleby
Melvin?
- [60:40]
Annie Newbond
No, I'm all right, thank you.
- [60:42]
David Dimbleby
I love some tea, please.
- [60:44]
Anne Bruce Sutherland
It'd be nice.
- [60:44]
Annie Newbond
I have to, I have to run.
- [60:46]
Melvin Bragg
Yes, I would have to get to Waterloo.
- [60:49]
David Dimbleby
Well, thank you very much. I hope you enjoyed it.
- [60:51]
Melvin Bragg
As always the last time. Thank you very much. Au revoir.
- [60:56]
David Dimbleby
Bye.
- [60:56]
Melvin Bragg
Now in Our Time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson and it's a BBC Studios audio production. I'm David Dimbleby and from the history.
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David Dimbleby
Podcast and BBC Radio 4, this is.
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Melvin Bragg
Invisible Hands, the story of the free market revolution.
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The free market isn't solving the problem of homelessness.
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Enterprise, free markets, a hidden force that changed Britain forever.
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There's a massive schism between those who believe in the continuity of our society.
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And those who wish to destroy it.
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Listen to Invisible Hands on BBC Sounds now.
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Bill Walton
After the fall of the Soviet Union, the newly independent nation of Lithuania had a point to prove everything was political back then.
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We had a responsibility so that the.
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Nation could be even more united in such difficult times.
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Bill Walton
And their men's national basketball team did just that.
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With a little help from the iconic American rock group, the Grateful Dead.
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Amazing sports stories from the BBC World Service presents Bill Walton's the Grateful Team.
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Annie Newbond
Team.
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