Just watched an excellent documentary on Einstein.

[donco6]

It's about the path to E=mc2, who contributed to the individual pieces, the roles other people played, and how it all came together under Einstein.

One of the most interesting parts is the impact of several women whose names did not become household words as male scientists like Niels Bohr or Max Planck or even the one female often referred to: Marie Curie - but whose contributions were astonishing. How could this have happened? It's very disturbing to me that I spent years in calculus, chemistry, engineering and Modern Physics but I never once heard the name Lise Meitner:

Hahn and Meitner met clandestinely in Copenhagen in November to plan a new round of experiments, and they subsequently exchanged a series of letters. Hahn then performed the difficult experiments which isolated the evidence for nuclear fission at his laboratory in Berlin. The surviving correspondence shows that Hahn recognized that fission was the only explanation for the barium, but, baffled by this remarkable conclusion, he wrote to Meitner. The possibility that uranium nuclei might break up under neutron bombardment had been suggested years before, notably by Ida Noddack in 1934. However, by employing the existing "liquid-drop" model of the nucleus,<14> Meitner and Frisch were the first to articulate a theory of how the nucleus of an atom could be split into smaller parts: uranium nuclei had split to form barium and krypton, accompanied by the ejection of several neutrons and a large amount of energy (the latter two products accounting for the loss in mass). She and Frisch had discovered the reason that no stable elements beyond uranium (in atomic number) existed naturally; the electrical repulsion of so many protons overcame the "strong" nuclear force.<14> Meitner also first realised that Einstein's famous equation, E = mc2, explained the source of the tremendous releases of energy in atomic decay, by the conversion of the mass into energy.


For this, Hahn won the Nobel prize, but Meitner was utterly overlooked. Outrageous! But I'm very glad to have finally heard about her work, including her escape from Nazi Germany and later recognition. It's a fascinating documentary. Well worth watching.

[TheDebbieDee]

1. ???????? I thought Niels Bohr was a MAN!

[donco6]

3. Oops, my phrasing is not quite right there.

Good catch.

[Hannah Bell]

6. ...

[Lindsey]

2. Well did you see the documentary? Did you rent it or was it

on PBS or a cable channel?

[donco6]

4. It came with my Discover magazine.

Einstein's Big Idea. It looks like it's also shown on Nova.

[The Second Stone]

5. You might want to Google Rosalind Franklin

She did all the work in discovering DNA that Watson and Crick got the credit for. And died of radiation poisoning too boot as a direct result of her work.