Customer Reviews

Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics (California Studies in the History of Science, Vol 13)

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I first learned of Lise Meitner from a book on atomic energy when I was a kid. I remember the illustration of her and her lab partner Otto Hahn staring at an apparatus in which they discovered the tell-tale signs of radioactive fission. But when I went through science courses in high school and college, she was hardly mentioned. This book has put her in her rightful place in the history of the atomic age. While it is always easy for a biographer to skew the importance of the individual being chronicled, that is certainly not the case here. Given the obstacles placed in her path by her gender, her religious affiliations, and her citizenship, her story is all that more remarkable for a view of our world which has been papered over in the last half-century.

That she would persevere despite everything is a testament to will and the desire for knowledge. Girls growing up in this day and age are not encouraged to pursue the scientific disciplines, but I think if a young girl today were to read Lise Meitner's story, she might just be inspired. I fully intend to give my copy to my daughter some day, in the hope of stirring a passion for science and the knowledge that if she applies herself, no matter the obstacles, she can become someone great.

This is the story, well told, of one of the world's most important achievements by one of its finest scientific heroes who was forced to suffer the indignities of both racism and sexism.

Against improbably long odds, beginning with her family who did not want her to become a Physicist, to Nazi persecution for being a Jew, to her eventual need to flee Nazi Germany to exile in Sweden, Lise Meitner's career progression led her to be among the logical choices to discover how to split the atom and to infer that it could lead to a chain reaction, and eventually to the development of the fissional atomic bomb.

This gripping story tells of how her less able male colleague, Otto Hahn, a Nazi Chemist, rather than a Physicist, effectively stole her ideas and went on to win a Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1944) for an achievement that should justly have gone to a Physcist, and Meitner in particular.

In fact Hahn had no idea how to interpret the experimental data in his hand until Meitner, through correspondence from exile in Sweden interpreted it for him. Based on her continuous advice via mail, Hahn was eventually able to take credit for her ideas. And although this egregious error was never formally corrected, Meitner, with great dignity and strength remains larger than life and stands as a towering monument to what the human spirit can accomplish in the face of racism and chauvinism. Five stars.

Lise Meitner may not be particularly well known outside of scientific circles today, but the same could be said of a lot of other great scientists, mathematicians, etc...Anyway, she is one of my favorite scientists of all time. This book helped cement that for me...

One of the reasons for her fame (or slight lack thereof) is that she never recieved the Nobel Prize for her nuclear work. It went to Otto Hahn. Had Lise shared in the prize, as many think she should have, she would almost certainly be better known today. I mean, the Nobel Prize sort of separates "known scientists" from "unknowns" as far as the general population is concerned (not counting popularizers like the late Carl Sagan and Stephen J. Gould). She was however, briefly famous in the US after WW2 as the "mother of the atom bomb" or some such - a title she rather disliked...In the late 1990s, the element 109 was named "Meitnerium" in her honor. And I beleive the element named for Hahn ("Hahnium"?) has been renamed something else.

I won't go into the plot of the book since its a biography and we know about whom. I will say she faced huge obstacles in her life, most notably being a young female who desired a high education at the turn of the century (1800s-1900s I mean) and who managed to obtain it; also being a Jewess scientist during the Nazi takeover of Germany and Austria - this time as a middle-aged woman (almost 60), forced to rebuild her life. She perservered ! These obstacles are well documented and discussed in this excellent book.

There is a brief but fascinating look into Vienna in the late 1800s that really enjoyed. It showed how the Meitners came to be in Vienna and what their world was like. I would have liked to have known more about her siblings, where they went and what they became (particularly her little brother Walter, who is tantalizingly mentioned several times as Lise's favorite - but no details are given. The two are buried near each other in Bramley, England).

If there is a negative to the book, it is that there's a certain amount of strict science (numbers, math, sci-jargon, and calculations) in the book. BUT - don't let that turn you off ! I just skipped past those parts that were over my head, and focused on the "biographical" part - the parts about Lise herself, which in fact, make up the majority of the book. Author Sime made it easy to do that in the way she wrote the book.

I highly recommend this work. I believe this will be the definitive Bio on Meitner, barring any unknown letters, secret love-child, or other stuff coming to light....Kudos to author Dr. Ruth Sime for the great work!

I found this a very readable and important summary of Meitner's career.It is a very human story and helps explain the great injustices which deprived her of a well deserved Nobel Prize. It's manages full scientific details without becoming obscure.

The times of Lise Meitner spans two World Wars, and the ensuing Cold War between the two super powers of the East and the West. Lise Meitner's career also spans some of the most fascinating developments of modern physics. As it happened, this includes the beginning of the nuclear age; and it continues with the age of nuclear weapons and nuclear energy resulting from pioneering and basic research into nuclear fission, started by the two Meitner and Otto Hahn.

Lise Meitner was born in Vienna in 1878, and she started her career in the turbulent times of the First World War, at a time when Germany was a clear leader in physics research, in the Golden Era of physics. Yet, Lise Meitner was the first woman German scientist. When she started her studies, German universities were almost entirely closed to women; and especially so in the sciences.

The author Ruth Sime paints a personal and a compassionate portrait of Lise Meitner, her life and her times; and she vividly brings to life the tragic events in our modern history which shaped Lise Meitner's turbulent career. A central theme in the book is the physics community's reaction to the first use by the USA of a fission bomb over Japan in 1945, (in fact it was two nuclear bombs, one was a Uranium bomb, and the other Plutonium.)

In Berlin, building on a decade of research by Meintner and Otto Hahn, in 1938, the three Lise Meitner, Hahn, and Fritz Strassmann discovered nuclear fission. The Nobel Prize went to Hahn alone, and Lise Meitner has been largely forgotten. The book weaves together the individuals, their thoughts (through correspondence), their ambitions, and their flawed judgments.

A part of the story is the ensuing events following the discovery of fission; events that were shaped largely by others than Lise Meitner. During the Second World War, Lise Meitner was a refugee in neutral Sweden. Since she was part Jewish, she had to flee for her life; flee what became Hitler's extermination machine. The racial laws began in the Third Reich with Hitler's dismissal in 1933 of university faculty with Jewish family tree, and it progressed to what we now know as the Holocaust.

Many of the German scientists in the 1930ties were Jewish, or partly Jewish, and they were dismissed by Hitler in 1933, or in the years up to the war. The year before the outbreak of war in 1939 was the last chance to escape, and the entire physics community dispersed as German scientists had to flee, --- some chose to escape. A small number went to neutral Sweden, and others who had left earlier ended up in the USA, and became leaders in the Manhattan project, the secret Los Alamos team of scientists, led by Oppenheimer, the team which built the first atomic bomb. There were some German scientists, Otto Hahn among them who didn't have to flee. They included Lise Meitner's research collaborators, Hahn, and Strassmann, plus Max von Laue, Werner Heisenberg, and of course others. Lise Meitner never married, but was close to Otto Hahn before and after the War. And at high noon, Hahn helped Meintner to escape to Niels Bohr's Copenhagen, and then to neutral Sweden when Denmark became occupied by the Third Reich.

Those of the German physicists who stayed behind were faced with a Faustian choice, knowing Hitler's evil regime and the diabolic potential of the nuclear bomb, what does a scientist do? Does he stay in Hitler's Germany even if he doesn't have to? The second half of the book is about how Lise Meitner and her colleagues judged the physics community's reaction to the Faustian choice it had faced during the ten years of the Third Reich, and which it still was facing during the Cold War. It includes personal correspondence. One letter from Lise Meitner to Otto Hahn touched me. In it Lise Meitner was addressing those of her colleagues who had stayed behind in Germany and had worked on nuclear physics for Hitler, at least in one form or the other. They were her friends and colleagues from youth, and yet she felt compelled to point out what seems to be striking moral flaws: When the war ended in 1945, few of Lise Meitner's former colleagues express any regrets, and appeared instead to ponder the question of why the USA beat the Germany team of scientists in building a fission bomb. What is especially touching is to observe how it pains Lise Meitner to have to spell out this fact to her friends; friends she remained close to for her entire life. And in this ambivalent relationship lies yet another Faustian choice.

It is perhaps ironic that the theme of the Faustian choice has a prominent place in German literature, from the medieval "Faustus" tale to Goethe, Weber's Freischuetz, to Martin Luther's Protestantism, and to Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus (Mann's moral despair over his country's complacent embrace of Nazism).
Palle Jorgnesen, September 2005.

It is well known that in the fields of both science and math, women are less visible than men. Ruth Lewin Sime, a woman of science herself, wrote this excellent book about a tiny Jewish woman who escaped the Nazis after World War II and was deprived of the Nobel Prize she clearly deserved. Meitner never married but physics gave meaning to her life, she was responsible for nuclear fission. This is a book that should be part of the reading lists in women's studies and in all high schools. It can serve as a magnet in attracting females to study science. Lise Meitner broke the patterns of women denied equitable access to education. This book is not only well written but it is also rich in fotos with an appendix full of interesting scientific data. You don't have to be in the field of science to understand this historical biography of an incredible woman.

Ruth Sime's, Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics, is a tribute to one of the most outstanding women physicists in the world's history. Sime's includes a detailed account of Meitners childhood, career, trials, tribulations, misfortunes, and fulfilling accomplishments through a collection of Meitner's personal papers, correspondences, and interviews with her contemporaries and friends. The reader enjoy's learning about the young girl in Vienna, who travels to Germany with only the ambition to learn and breathe physics. The reader enjoys Meitner's accomplishments, as she is promoted to being Max Planck's assistant in Prussia, despite her gender, and feels the betrayal when she is not credited with Otto Hahn for the Nobel Peace Prize.
All in all, Sime's does an excellent job of telling Meitner's story and providing insight on the historical and scientific contexts. The scientific explanations of both Meitner's research and of her contemporaries is hard to understand for those who are amateur physicists and are not cognizant of many basic principles of chemistry and physics. However, for a woman who was not given her credit where it was due, Sime's biography is truly telling of her life and just how remarkable this physicist of humanity really was.

This book was a very detailed description of Lise Meitner's life-her family growing up, her hardships, her fond memories, accounts of important events, etc. Meitner was surrounded in an intellectually stimulating environment, one that her family encouraged and which continued throughout her life. She attended school at the University of Vienna, where she was able to attend lectures and classes from famous professors, such as Franz Exner and Ludwig Boltzmann. She graduated summa cum laude and was even awarded a doctoral degree. She became the first woman Assistant in Prussia under Max Planck, and was also the first woman in Germany to gain the title of Professor. She and Otto Hahn developed a reputation together in radioactivity and went into nuclear physics independently. She also faced many hardships, the main one being deprived of the Nobel Prize she deserved for her contributions to the discovery of nuclear fission. However, despite great disappointments and unfair events, Lise Meitner was able to look forward. She is remembered as "a physicist who never lost her humanity."
The author of this book, Ruth Lewin Sime, wrote this book to give a voice to a woman of science who has almost vanished. Throughout the years, women have been deprived of recognition for their contributions. Although women have made all kinds of accomplishments, many go unnoticed, neglected, and become almost invisible. In Meitner's case, her name is hardly seen in literature and the distortion of reality and the suppression of memory are evident, especially since it was during the time of Nazi Germany. Even her contributions to nuclear fission were ignored and unrecognized. Although she faced unbearable unfairness, she kept quiet and did not complain or fight for herself. Sime wished to be the voice of the amazing life Lise Meitner lived, surrounded by family, friends, and a love for physics.
If you are truly interested in physics and the events that took place "behind-the-scenes," then you should read this book. It gives amazingly accurate accounts of Meitner's life and everything she went through. Not only does it give the personal account of Meitner, it also has scientific explanations of her discoveries and collaborations with other scientists. It blends the personal life and the scientific life of Lise Meitner in an interesting way.

This was a highly readable and very accurate account of Meitner's life and work. It tells the story of the discovery of nuclear fission so that it is understandable to the layman. It also sets the record straight with regard to Meitner's very important contribution to the understand of the nucleus. Also of interest was the account of the interaction of Meitner, who was Jewish, with her German colleagues before, during and after the second world war.

This remarkable woman overcame serious obstacles to pursue her drive for scientific discovery. The book is very well written. The issues of feminism, Nazism and nuclear physics are presented clearly.