Great series from @PhysicsWorld on scientists (nearly all women) overlooked for a Nobel. Additional reason that Meitner was overlooked: as a refugee in Sweden, she was working in Manne Siegbahn's lab... 1/
https://twitter.com/PhysicsWorld/status/1313172637825355776
Siegbahn was a physics Nobelist, very influential in the higher echelons of Swedish science and, apparently, a notorious misogynist (see Ruth Lewin Sime's ace biog) who was resentful about Meitner's presence.
Sime's quarter-century old biography is a compelling portrait of Meitner's life-- including a record of the many many slights she endured during her life at the hands of some of her closest colleagues-slights we now commonly call microaggressions and gaslighting. 3/
After the atom bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the press called her the 'Jewish mother of the bomb' -- even though she refused to work on the Manhattan project and was a life-long pacifist 4/
After the Nobel was awarded to her former colleagues for the discovery of fission, she continued her research on a shoestring budget and never regained her professorship.
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