A Tribute to Lise Meitner (1878-1968)

Physics is irresistible. Though prepared to become a teacher of French at an Austrian highschool, Lise Meitner, daughter of a lawyer, could not help coming under the spell of physics. By lucky coincidence she followed courses dispensed by no one less than Ludwig Boltzmann, whose wit and humour proved contagious. After her PhD, under Franz Exner, she moved on, not to Paris to work with Marie Curie, but to Berlin, to consult with Max Planck on future contingencies. Before leaving for Berlin, however, she was introduced to ‘radioactivity’ by Stefan Meyer.

The Plague Spreads to Austria and Italy

Hitler annexed Austria to Germany on March 15, 1938. Erwin Schrödinger, in Graz, soon regretted having applauded this and fled to Dublin. Stefan Meyer pre-emptively resigned his professorship in Vienna. Marietta Blau, discoverer of cosmic-ray disintegration “stars,” immigrated to Mexico. Polonium expert Elizabeth Rona immigrated to America. Renowned Lise Meitner escaped to Stockholm, where she received little scientific or personal support. Mussolini’s Fascist Italy adopted Nazi racial policies and enacted anti-Semitic laws in the fall of 1938. Bruno Rossi, dismissed from his professorship in Padua, immigrated with his wife to England and then to America. Emilio Segrè relinquished his professorship in Palermo and immigrated with his wife and young son to America. Enrico Fermi, his Jewish wife Laura, and their two children, went to Stockholm where he received the 1938 Nobel Prize in Physics and then immigrated to America to begin what Laura Fermi called the process of Americanization.

Vienna and the Institute for Radium Research

Rutherford and Chadwick’s experiments and Rutherford’s explanation were vigorously challenged in 1922 by the Swede, Hans Pettersson and his Austrian partner, Gerhard Kirsch, working in the Institute for Radium Research in Vienna, which had been founded by an Austrian industrialist and philanthropist and officially opened in 1910. Its director, Rutherford’s friend Stefan Meyer, was a cultured Viennese of Jewish descent who created a family-like environment that was unusually supportive of women researchers. Its existence was seriously threatened by the postwar runaway inflation in Austria, whose devastating consequences were somewhat mitigated when Rutherford arranged to purchase the radium loaned to him on Meyer’s initiative by the Vienna Academy of Sciences before the war.