Lise Meitner

A Life in Physics

Author: Ruth Lewin Sime
ISBN: 9780520208605

When sixty-year-old Lise Meitner fled Nazi Germany in 1938, she carried with her nothing but a small valise and a deep, abiding passion for physics. Eight years later Meitner, co-discoverer with Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann of nuclear fission, watched as Hahn alone received the Nobel Prize for their joint research. In telling the dramatic personal story of this extraordinary woman, Ruth Sime's definitive biography illuminates the scientific and social progress and the injustice and destruction that have marked the twentieth century. As a shy young woman from Vienna, Lise Meitner braved the institutional sexism of the scientific world to make a place for herself at the prestigious Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin. She became prominent in the international physics community and was a pioneer of nuclear physics. Her career spanned the development of atomic physics from the early years of radioactivity to the brink of the nuclear age. She refused to participate in the All

Publisher: University of California Press
Publish Date: 1996

Subjects: Biography & Autobiography / Science & Technology

This book is available in the following Community Centers: Women's Center (Location: Biography/Autobiography)