From: Verlie Whitlock (whitlock@NRTCO.NET)
Date: Fri May 28 1999 - 06:57:10 PDT
Walter,
I was somewhat saddened by your reaction to my comment that the names of
all those concerned had not been included in your account of the original
'splitting of the atom'; my remark that "we women have to look out for each
other" was made rather tongue-in-cheek, since I consider that this e-mail
List is intended for the education of later generations, and not as a forum
for gender-equity exchanges.
Lise Meitner was, first and foremost, a scientist, and in scientific
circles, her name is always included with those of Hahn and Strassmann in
any account of the discovery of fission. Meitner, along with her nephew
Otto Frisch, provided both the theoretical explanation of fission and the
crucial experimental proof, and coined the word "fission" when she and
Frisch
announced the discovery to the world.
In fairness to all concerned, I quote below from the first-hand account
of Leslie Cook, a former Director with Atomic Energy of Canada, who was at
the Kaiser Wilhelm Instititute from 1936-38, including the time during which
the discoveries were made. The paper was presented in June 1989 at the
Canadian Nuclear Society/Association symposium celebrating "50 Years of
Nuclear Fission", in Ottawa, Canada.
"Contrary to what seems to be science history dogma, Hahn and Strassmann
never mentioned fission, nor even claimed to have discovered it. What they
actually did was confirm a unique and new discovery made by Irene Curie
[Marie's daughter] and Pavel Savic in Paris, that the irradiation of uranium
with neutrons yielded a radioactive substance that chemically resembled
lanthanum more than any other known element. Hahn and Strassmann, at first
scathing and unbelieving, quickly confirmed this [...]
"Hahn had kept all these strange results secret from his colleagues in the
institute, trusting them only by mail to Meitner who was in refuge in
Sweden. Thus it was Meitner, after sharing them with her nephew Frisch, who
guessed that the results had to be interpreted as fission. They quickly
sought the recoil pulses, found them, and announced their discovery to the
world -- much to the anger of Hahn's colleague physicists in the institute
who felt they had been unjustly cut out of sharing in this great discovery.
"Even so, this interpretation was not original with Meitner and Frisch. In
1933 Fermi reported finding five radioactive substances on irradiation
uranium with neutrons, and with the support of some primitive chemistry
suggested they might be transuranics -- which of course was what he expected
them to be. Very quickly a German woman chemist [Ira Noddack] published a
detailed critique of this and suggested fission instead as a conceivable
alternative explanation. For anyone with the equipment (which Ira Noddack
did not have), it would have taken half an hour's work to check this idea
out. But Hahn and Meitner rejected it out of hand as "sheer fantasy",
coming from someone not even in the nuclear field, and totally ignorant of
nuclear physics. [...]
"I cannot help observing also that the three women scientists -- Curie,
Noddack, and Meitner -- were the contributors of all of the intuitive,
original and correct ideas that repeatedly guided the experiments back onto
the right track. Only they apparently were able to think big enough to
encompass the situation, and this despite the fact that they were anything
but friends." (Leslie Cook)
An excellent site covering Meitner's life and work may be explored at
http://www.users.bigpond.com/Sinclair/fission/LiseMeitner.html and a subpage
detailing her supreme contribution to the discovery of fission may be found
at http://www.users.bigpond.com/Sinclair/fission/Work4.html For those
subscribers who are unable to gain access to this website, I quote below
some of the information contained on the subpage:
"Although Hahn later downplayed Meitner's contribution to their research, (a
denial Meitner never overcame, despite Niels Bohr's efforts to set the
record straight) Meitner's Berlin colleagues were at a loss to proceed in
her absence, as she was the driving impetus in their work, especially in the
accompanying theory and logic. At her instruction, Hahn bombarded uranium
with neutrons, and he found that a strange radioactive homologue of Barium
was formed. This could not be explained by Hahn, Strassman or any other
contemporary physicist. [...]
"Meitner was the first in the world to explain what had happened, and the
first to realise the massive release of energy that takes place (200 MeV).
She and Frisch were able to calculate this using Einstein's famous equation
for mass-energy equivalence: E = mc2. [...]
"Following her success and prominence, Meitner was invited to join the
Manhattan Project, building an atomic weapon. Her work led directly to the
possibility of nuclear weapons, but Meitner would have no part in building a
weapon of such destructive force. She went to great lengths to distance
herself from the negative possibilities her discoveries created."
===
My interest at all times is simply to set the record straight and not to
engage in rhetoric based on opinion or emotion; in making submissions to
this List, we should not present historical accounts as facts unless we are
willing to tell the whole story, or as much of it as we are able to support
with documented evidence. Personal memories of the time are always
extremely interesting to the rest of us, but should always be presented as
entertaining anecdote and not as hard fact.
Verlie
Technology is the patsy of human error