Word: meitner
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Died. Lise Meitner, 89, Austrian-born nuclear physicist, whose basic research was vital to the development of the atomic bomb; in Cambridge, England. In 1938, after three decades of pioneering work in radioactivity with Chemist Otto Hahn at Berlin's Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, Lise, a Jew, was forced to flee to Sweden-just when she and Hahn were on the verge of achieving nuclear fission. When Hahn sent her the details of his experiments with uranium some months later, she completed the immensely complex mathematical calculations proving that he had indeed split the atom and, in the process, released...
...innate caution stopped him from making so bold a claim in public. "As nuclear chemists," Hahn and his young collaborator, Fritz Strassmann, wrote later, "we cannot bring ourselves to take this step, so contradictory to all the experience of nuclear physics." But Hahn's former coworker, Physicist Lise Meitner, had no such hesitation. Hearing of the experiment in exile in Sweden, she not only proclaimed that Hahn and Strassmann had achieved nuclear fission, but also calculated that each atom of uranium had released 20 million times as much energy as a comparable amount...
Early in 1939, before the start of World War II, Bohr made a trip to the U.S. Just as his ship was about to leave Copenhagen, two German refugee physicists, Lise Meitner and O. R. Frisch, rushed aboard with a dismaying report. They had just heard that German Chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann in Berlin had split the uranium atom. This was atomic fission, and with it the Nazis might soon be able to build an atomic bomb...