November 7: The unofficial day of women in nuclear science?

[NNadir]

November 7: The unofficial day of women in nuclear science?



An excerpt:

Marie Curie was born in Warsaw in 1867 on this day, 155 years ago. Exactly 11 years later, in 1878, Lise Meitner was born in Vienna. November 7 is also the date when, in 1911, the Swedish Royal Academy of Science decided to award Curie a second Nobel Prize for her 1898 discovery of the elements radium and polonium (coincidentally, her 44th birthday). Curie, who at age 36 had shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with her husband, Pierre Curie, and Henri Becquerel, later accepted the chemistry prize on December 10, 1911, and remains to this day the only person—man or woman—to receive two Nobel Prizes in two different categories. On this unofficial day of women in nuclear science, let’s take a moment to acknowledge the fundamental discoveries of both Curie and Meitner.

Curie: Delivering a lecture the day after receiving her second Nobel Prize, Curie acknowledged that the discovery of radium and polonium was rightfully credited to both her and her late husband, adding that “the chemical work aimed at isolating radium in the state of the pure salt, and at characterizing it as a new element, was carried out specially by me, but it is intimately connected with our common work.”

“In this field, the importance of radium from the viewpoint of general theories has been decisive,” she said. “The history of the discovery and the isolation of this substance has furnished proof of my hypothesis that radioactivity is an atomic property of matter and can provide a means of seeking new elements...

...Meitner: Lise Meitner was the first person to describe the splitting of atoms under neutron bombardment as nuclear fission, though it was Otto Hahn alone, Meitner’s longtime colleague, who was awarded a Nobel Prize for that fundamental discovery in 1944, despite Meitner having been nominated as well.

In fact, Meitner was nominated for a Nobel Prize 49 times over 43 years, from 1924 through 1967, 30 times for physics and 19 times for chemistry. She was nominated by 24 different men, several of whom nominated her multiple times (Max Planck nominated her the most times—seven—both for physics and for chemistry). Her nominations came from 10 countries: Denmark, France, Germany, India, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Yet Meitner never received a single Nobel Prize in recognition of her work.

Meitner was the first female professor of physics in Germany, but as a Jewish woman she was forced to flee Nazi Germany, leaving her home and laboratory to relocate in Sweden, where she continued to work for many years. She spent her later years traveling and speaking to women students...

From my perspective, Lise Meitner is the discoverer of nuclear fission. The person who won the Nobel Prize for the "discovery," Otto Hahn, merely performed an experiment, in Nazi Germany from which Meitner was banished, the result of which puzzled him. Meitner correctly interpreted and explained to him what he was seeing. Otherwise he was rather clueless.

I think the number of times Meitner was nominated for the Nobel Prize without receiving it is a record or close to a record, possibly only matched by Gilbert N. Lewis.

[NNadir]

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