Fritz Houtermans, A Swiss/German/Austrian/Dutch/Jewish physicist, was the first person to realize what makes the stars shine. Well, to tell the truth, “the first person to …” is a phrase badly used in science; it’s often not exactly the truth. All scientific progress builds on a growing body of knowledge, and when that body grows to a certain level it sets up the next discovery for whoever is bright enough to grasp it. And frequently that means more than one person, so coincidental discoveries by more than one person are often the case. Thus Lise Meitner discovered nuclear fission, which was hiding in the radiochemical data of groups working in Rome under Enrico Fermi and in Berlin under Otto Hahn, but so did another female German scientist, Ida Noddack; Meitner gets the credit, Noddack is forgotten. The list of such simultaneous discoveries goes back a long way, through special relativity (Einstein and Lorentz) and calculus (Newton and Leibniz) and gravity (Newton and Hooke) all the way back to whoever were the first people to realize the earth was round. So Fritz Houtermans actually may not have been the first, but no one preceded him, as far as we know. In 1959, at Brookhaven, while we were discussing a possible research appointment at his Physikalisches Institut in Berne (which he said he was laboriously tugging into the twentieth century), he told me of his epiphany. He was courting a lovely girl, he said, and in lieu of a local movie theatre he took her on a long walk into the countryside. Night fell and the moon came out and they lay down on a small rug he had thoughtfully (and hopefully) brought along and by the light of the moon they made love. Afterwards he dozed, and woke to find the moon had set and the cool clear night was ablaze with stars. He lay there staring up at them, oblivious of the young lady curled beside him, and (he said) with an inspiration so sudden it was almost as if the stars themselves were telling him their secret, he realized what it was: “Helium, that was the key!”
Lise Meitner, 1878-1968
