Zion Lights Profile picture
Mar 8 10 tweets 4 min read
🧵 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. Image
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. Image
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. Image
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. Image
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. Image
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. Image
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. Image
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. Image
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 Image
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. Image

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Zion Lights

Zion Lights Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @ziontree

Feb 27
Professor on the panel who argued for solar: nuclear cannot be built quickly enough to decarbonise. It cannot be done in under 20 years anywhere in the world, and (etc)

Me: Actually, in France…

Professor: Thank you for that Zion, I didn’t know. You’ve changed my mind.

🎯
The students were also v engaged & asked good questions. I did a similar debate to this two years ago and the experience & reception were wildly different… Just goes to show how much things have changed. Going to take some credit for that. Thanks to everyone else who has helped!
I was disappointed to hear the nuclear energy PhD student on the panel criticise fission, based on similar points to the professor, because he wanted to promote his favourite tech - SMRs. Can’t we focus on the aim instead - to phase out fossil fuels by doing what we know works?
Read 4 tweets
Feb 27
This font. No. Image
It’s hideous Image
Make it stop, Nat Geo Image
Read 4 tweets
Jan 27
🧵
Vandana Shiva is widely celebrated as an “eco warrior goddess,” but she spreads misinformation about GMOs and campaigns against them and other solutions. In fact, her campaigning harms people.
Shiva is popular in western middle-class circles because of her anti-technology, anti-progress ideology. She should not be representing Indian farmers, but westerners bestow honours upon her, eg Time Magazine called her an “environmental hero” in 2003.
Read 7 tweets
Jan 26
In an era of eco-anxiety, how do we protect young people from the lure of doomerism?

56% of young people feel that ‘humanity is doomed.’ Out of desperation and fear, many young people are joining climate activist groups.

zionlights.substack.com/p/in-an-era-of…
I understand why: I’ve been there, done that, bought the rhetoric. But after two decades of taking action, it’s become clear that some groups are doing more harm than good.

I was misled by these organisations, and many young people are being misled now.
Leaving was difficult. Similar tactics are used to gain and retain members of climate activist organisations as are used in religious cults.

"Members are holy, special, chosen; outsiders are unholy, ignorant, toxic. We have the truth, and everyone else is being misled.”
Read 8 tweets
Oct 14, 2022
Energiewende, or “energy turnaround”, was Germany’s plan to run on only renewable energy by 2038. Integral to this was complete closure of nuclear energy.

Energiewende has failed; Germany is missing its own climate targets. This is not just due to the invasion of Ukraine.🪡
In 2018, a European Commission report concluded: “Simultaneous phase out of nuclear energy & growing energy demand has led to unchanged levels (same as 1990) of energy generation from gas,coal & lignite leading to slower decrease in GHG emission levels”

ec.europa.eu/info/sites/inf…
In 2019, Germany's Federal Court of Auditors criticised the €160 billion cost of Energiewende over the last 5 years, as the expenditure was "in extreme disproportion to the results".

Meanwhile, German electricity prices were among the highest in Europe.

spiegel.de/international/…
Read 10 tweets
Jul 5, 2022
Absolute shame on Greenpeace for using the Ukrainian flag this way, when Ukraine is FOR nuclear power.

Greenpeace’s activism is the reason countries like Germany are so dependent on Russian fossil fuels, thereby funding Putin’s war. 🗑
Get in the 🗑 @Greenpeace_Lux
The Ukrainian government’s official position is in FAVOUR of the inclusion of nuclear energy under the EU taxonomy.

Citation: this statement sent to MEPs by the Ukrainian Ministry of Energy.
Read 5 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us on Twitter!

:(