Lise Meitner’s Nuclear Vision
During the Second World War, Berlin scientists discovered nuclear fission. Only one of them got the credit. Why was Lise Meitner written out of history?
Long before she died, the Austrian physicist Lise Meitner was horrified to realise that she was being written out of history. ‘My future is cut off’, she lamented; ‘shall the past also be taken from me?’ The Nazis had recently annexed Austria, forcing her to flee from the Berlin research institute where she had worked for more than 30 years. Protestant by conviction but Jewish by birth, Meitner had been illegally smuggled out on a hazardous journey through the Netherlands and Denmark, finally arriving in Stockholm with just a suitcase of clothes.
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