Sheril KirshenbaumDec 26, 2022

Fission is in the news, but few recognize that a woman physicist was behind the discovery.

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 w/o her in 1944, even though she had given the first theoretical explanation.

Albert Einstein called Meitner “our Marie Curie." She also adamantly refused to work on the atomic bomb during WWII. https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/201502/physicshistory.cfm #women #history #science #HistoryRemix

This Month in Physics History

February 11, 1939: Meitner/Frisch paper on nuclear fission

Show threadmath_poly

@Sheril

For those who find the science or the people interesting, strongly recommend Richard Rhodes’s “The Making of the Atomic Bomb” which details the people and relationships behind the physics and chemistry which led to …. Meitner receives significant coverage for her scientific contributions. It’s almost a survey of early molecular physics. It’s the kind of book which one can re-read every 10 years. It won the Pulitzer Prize in ‘88 so not exactly unknown, but one of the best ever.

It’s not a war-glorifying book at all, IMHO. Also talks about the effort to deny science to Germany and those who refused to work the project.

Dec 26, 2022 at 3:04pmWeb
Show threadMacCruiskeenDec 26, 2022
@math_poly @Sheril the story of how she had to escape Nazi Germany on an expired Austrian passport is fairly dramatic.
Show threadDr. FrogDec 26, 2022
@math_poly @Sheril I second the recommendation for "The Making of the Atomic Bomb"; it's the best book on the history of science that I've ever read. It explains the concepts of nuclear physics in a very understandable way, and I think captures some of the excitement of that period as physicists were beginning to grasp the inner workings of nature. It is also not horribly depressing. TBH, my own interest in open-source software reflects Bohr's "open world" as described by Rhodes.
Show threadDr. Ruchira S. DattaDec 27, 2022

@math_poly @Sheril Thanks for the recommendation!

Am in the midst of Robert K. Wilcox, _Japan's Secret War_, about Japan's atomic bomb project during WWII. (They detonated the bomb on August 12th, 1945, shortly before the US postwar occupation.)

Show threadDr. Ruchira S. DattaDec 27, 2022
@math_poly @Sheril A slight oddity is that every now and then he cites Wikipedia. He's very meticulous about citing a particular numbered box of declassified materials, or a page range from a book his translator read to him, so these Wikipedia references are jarring. Everything on Wikipedia is supposed to have citations, so preferably one would go and cite the original sources. Perhaps in these cases the sources were in Japanese, which he doesn't know.