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.
Albert Einstein called Meitner “our Marie Curie." She also adamantly refused to work on the atomic bomb during WWII. https://whyy.org/articles/lise-meitner-the-forgotten-woman-of-nuclear-physics-who-deserved-a-nobel-prize/ #science #history
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.
Agreed. No scientist should have contributed to the technology of nuclear fission, in peace or in war.
But I didn't find mention of refusing to work on the bomb in the linked article, so I looked in Wikipedia and they also didn't mention it. Is there a source for this info Wolfgang?
But also something to "think" about:
At the time of the
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%E2%80%93Szilard_letter
informed physicists really feared that Nazi Germany was working on the atomic bomb.
I can imagine why Einstein signed that letter and why Fermi, Oppenheimer and others worked on the "Manhattan" project.
I also know that Einstein later regretted signing that letter.
Well, it's complicated: as long as there was a real threat, the Nazis would have this weapon...
@WolfgangFeist @Sheril A better use of resources would have been to sabotage the Nazi atomic bomb effort. But that would not have satisfied the desire of the War Dept to have a new weapon. I agree it's complicated.
My feeling today is that scientists should regret ever developing nuclear technology, ever mining uranium salts, ever causing hundreds of millions of tons of nuclear waste which we don't have a good plan to safely store, etc. etc. And the genie is out of the bottle. We should not have allowed scientists to rub that bottle.
The "thinking" behind that is, that the scientists just decide very much on their own what they are going to research.
Partially that was true: Galilei or a Volta could pretty much decide. Later on, that became rare. It became more and more a question of money - and those, who decided about the money. Often governments, nowadays big money companies.
Potential solutions: We would need something like the "oath of hippocrates" for all scientists. And: democratic control
... democratic control over this money!
The strategy of the most powerful rich was to make everyone (including the scientists) dependent on THEIR money. This would give them ultimate power - and it was believed that this was best for civilization. Because "all these other losers just won't make it" to keep "the complex industrial world" running and thriving.
Sheril Kirshenbaum
Wolfgang Feist
Maximilian Overdraft, Esq.