Thread by @ziontree

🧵 Today, on International Women’s Day let’s remember & celebrate an incredible scientist who you’ve probably never heard of:

Austrian-Swedish physicist LISE MEITNER

Lise was born in Vienna in 1878.

Lise excelled at science from an early age, but as a woman she no was advised to pursue another career.

Lise went on to co-discover and coin the term ‘fission’ anyway, although she was excluded from the Nobel Prize for it.

She also co-discovered the element protactinium.

Lise was only the second woman to obtain a doctoral degree in physics from the University of Vienna in 1905.

She was also the first woman to become a professor of physics in Germany, a position she later lost due to anti-Semitism.

As a woman in Berlin, Lise was denied access to the university’s laboratories. Fortunately, the ban did not apply to Otto Hahn’s improvised radiochemistry lab, which was in a converted cellar with a separate entrance. She was able to study radioactivity as an assistant there.

In 1923, Meitner discovered the radiationless transition known as the Auger effect, which is named for Pierre Victor Auger, a French scientist who discovered the effect independently two years later.

Lise was Jewish & was forced to flee Germany in 1938. Her passport became invalid, so she had to travel undercover, & she reached the Netherlands safety. She later said that she left Germany forever with 10 marks in her purse.

There, she worked with quantum physicist Max Planck.

Lise was often laughed at for being a smart woman. Her inaugural lecture on radioactivity & cosmic physics was reported as being about ‘cosmetic physics’.

The Nobel mistake was later partly rectified in 1966, when Lise was awarded the Enrico Fermi Award alongside co-workers.

Lise worked on Sweden's first nuclear reactor.

She retired to England in 1960 & died 8 years later. Her tombstone bears the inscription: “A physicist who never lost her humanity.”

The chemical element meitnerium was later named in her honour.

The life of this incredible woman is too rich to fully share here, but I hope your interest has piqued.

Lise overcame many challenges & heavily contributed to the scientific pursuit of knowledge. Also thanks to her work, we have nuclear energy today.

Share her story.

#IWD2023

Marie Curie, whose research on radioactivity won her the Nobel Prize, also contributed greatly to human knowledge.

These women profoundly impacted the course of human society. They’ve affected human life & civilisation as deeply as Isaac Newton & Michael Faraday.

Remember them.