🧵 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.
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?
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.
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.”
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”
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.