The Age of Radiance (17 page)

She wanted to work with Heinrich Rubens, the Department of Experimental Physics chair, but instead, Rubens introduced her to Otto Hahn,
a chemist working in radiation who needed to team up with an industrious physicist to reach the next level of his research. Fair-haired, chipmunk-cheeked, and always debonair with his hair carefully pomaded and his shirt collars crisp and celluloid, Hahn worked as
Privatdozent
at the university—a teaching post with the salary paid directly by student fees—but had a lab with Emil Fischer’s institute where both Hahn and Meitner could work, and which included electroscopes for measuring alpha, beta, and gamma rays. Emil Fischer, however, did not allow women into his Chemistry Institute after fears that a Russian student’s “exotic” hair would catch fire (though he never developed the same fear about his luxuriant beard). Hahn and Meitner had to convince Fischer to let them turn a carpenter’s work area into a lab for themselves—a situation redolent of the Curies’ cadaver hut—and they would collaborate as physicist and chemist over the next thirty years. Otto was patient, thorough, detail-oriented; Lise was mathematically adept and brilliant at thinking in broad strokes beyond the pale. His salt-of-the-earth personality made it easier for her to overcome that paralyzing shyness; in time, she called him Hänchen, “little rooster,” and began all of her letters with “Dear Otto!” Meitner, however, was never allowed to put one foot into the institute itself. To use the bathroom, she was forced to walk to a nearby restaurant.

“For many years I never had a meal with Lise Meitner except on official occasions. Nor did we ever go for a walk together,” Otto Hahn remembered. “Apart from the physics colloquia held at the university that we attended together, we met only at the carpenter’s shop. There we generally worked until nearly eight in the evening, so that one or the other would have to go out to buy salami or cheese before the shops closed at that hour. We never ate our cold supper together there. Lise Meitner went home alone, and so did I. And yet we were really very close friends.”

“My strongest and dearest remembrances are of Hahn’s almost indestructible cheerfulness and serene disposition, his constant helpfulness and his joy in music,” Meitner recalled. “We would frequently sing Brahms duets, particularly when the work went well.” She also remembered, though, that when they walked the streets together, a majority of the other scientists at the institute would pointedly say, “Good day, Herr Hahn!”—and say nothing to her. Hahn’s courage in working with a woman at this stage in history deserves commendation, especially as balance to his future ill treatment of this historic colleague.

Otto Hahn had worked under Ernest Rutherford at Canada’s McGill University, where the New Zealander who’d split the atom had said the
Frankfurter had
“a nose for discovering new elements,” and in 1908, Hahn and Meitner began their historic breakthroughs as a team by finding a short-lived radioelement, actinium C, using a leaf electroscope. Before the time of Geiger and his counters, a leaf of gold or aluminum was attached to a rod and sealed in a glass orb. When charged by electricity, the leaf was repelled from the rod and stiffened. When radioactive materials were placed nearby, their radiance ionized the air inside the orb and the leaf relaxed back to its original position. The rate of relaxation revealed the quantity of radiation.

One day the postman arrived with a package, and Meitner decided to play a little joke. From the other side of the lab, she announced how happy she was to get something from Rutherford. The clerk looked at the address label and was flabbergasted to see that she was right. He had no idea that the leaves of her electroscopes were flailing in response to the radioactive materials throbbing within the box in his hands. Eventually, Meitner developed a reputation with the locals as a psychic, and when she and Rutherford finally met in person, he was shocked:
“But I thought you were a
man
!”

At the university, though, in time she was fully accepted, because the school’s most powerful man took her on as his protégé. European schools at this time did not directly oversee a curriculum or course of study; students could take classes (and pay for them) in any order or on any topic they wished, meaning a
Privatdozent
’s salary, such as Hahn’s, was somewhat precarious. The success of an education depended on a student disciple’s finding a professor mentor, and these were almost unheard of for women. But Lise Meitner would have a mentor, and he would be the wondrous Max Planck.

When heated, objects radiate heat and light, beginning with various reds, then orange-yellow, and finally white-blue. The math explaining the relationship of heat and color should be simple. But it eluded physicists for decades. On October 19, 1900, Max Planck conceived of a formula developed from stringent lab results . . . a formula that violated the fundamental laws of both electromagnetism and thermodynamics. Planck realized in going over a graph comparing temperature to color spectra that the numbers did not rise evenly, like a smooth graph, but in steps, like a staircase. He called the base unit of these energy steps
h,
the quantum. But at the time, no one including Planck thought this discovery would change the future of science—everyone imagined that
h
would eventually be explained and integrated into the classical physics of electromagnetism and thermodynamics. Then Albert Einstein read Planck’s article, and
“it was as if the ground had been pulled out from under one, with no firm foundation to see anywhere, upon which one could have built.” Einstein used quanta to explain light,
Bohr used Planck’s quanta to explain atoms, and Erwin Schrödinger theorized that these particles were not “corpuscles,” as Einstein had described them, but condensed packets of waves, creating the illusion of a discrete object—a subatomic whitecap—reuniting quantum mechanics with classical physics.

With his Prussian heritage, his isosceles bush of a mustache, his enormous forehead, and his critical role in modern physics, Max Planck would seem born to intimidate humdrum mortals. Instead, he was as sweet as two Fermis, one of the most generous of scientists or academic leaders, even helping an obscure Swiss patent clerk by approving Einstein’s “miracle year” papers for publication in
Annalen der Physik
 . . . and the magnificent Planck did this even though he didn’t believe in the signature article, which was Einstein’s application of Planck’s quantum theory to photons . . . the article that would years later win Einstein his Nobel.
“As soon as we were in [Planck’s] home he played tag at least as eagerly as we young students: he tried to catch us while we ran, really he did,” Lise happily recalled. “In the summer we ran races in the garden, and Planck joined us with an almost childlike eagerness and pleasure. Planck once told us that [one colleague] was such a wonderful man that when he went into a room, the air in the room became better. Exactly the same could be said of Planck.”

In 1912, when Planck asked Meitner to succeed Max von Laue as his assistant, it would mean her first paycheck since arriving in Berlin six years before. Until this salaried position, the thirty-four-year-old Meitner had been getting an allowance from her parents for a dozen years, though she did make a few pfennig translating English papers into German and contributing articles to
Naturwissenschaftliche Rundschau
, the most important science journal in Germany, which published articles by the world’s greatest scientists. She said of Planck’s gift,
“It was the passport to scientific activity in the eyes of most scientists and a great help in overcoming many current prejudices against academic women.”

But even the great Planck’s support could only do so much. When Meitner moved with Hahn from Fischer’s to the new Kaiser Wilhelm Institute chemistry department, built as one of the first true ivory towers in the forested suburb of Dahlem—a sylvan glade far from urban life, where scientists could think and dream without distraction, and which distance from reality would nearly cost Meitner her life—Hahn was made chief of the radioactivity lab, given the title of professor, and paid five thousand marks. Lise’s title was “guest,” and her salary was 0. The lab, however, was unusual in that Hahn and Meitner insisted their staff make strenuous efforts to keep
the environment as clean as possible to reduce background radiation and achieve a purity of experiment. A side effect of this rigor was that Meitner and Hahn would be two of the few nuclear pioneers to die of old age . . . both at eighty-nine. The city of Hamburg meanwhile erected a monument to martyrs of nuclear science. By 1959, it would be inscribed with 360 names.

Nothing seems to be known of Meitner’s romantic or sexual life. When asked why she never married, she said she never had the time. One of Lise’s close friends in the 1910s was physicist James Franck. Together they played Brahms lieder, he on the violin, she on the piano, and when they were both in their eighties, he confessed that he had fallen in love with her. She said,
“Late!”

Meitner was in fact all too busy breaking ground—truly, as Einstein had said, the Marie Curie of Germany. In 1913, she was promoted to a salaried slot, the Hahn-Meitner Laboratorium opened, and she received royalties for mesothorium, the isotope she and Hahn had discovered, which became so commonly used in medicine that it was known as “German radium.” In the autumn of 1914, she worked as an X-ray technician for the Austrian army—efforts nearly identical to Marie Curie’s on the other side—but Lise’s fifteen hundred colleagues at KWI chemistry spent their war years researching poison gas, chemical weapons, and explosives under Fritz Haber. While Otto Hahn worked on phosgene, mustard gas, and chlorine—he would be applauded as a “Gas Pioneer”—Hans Geiger designed a gas mask. Watching the horrors of the Great War, Einstein believed that science and technology had become
“like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.” He was shocked by how eagerly German scientists helped with the killing and considered Haber one of those pathological criminals. Haber then personally went to field-test KWI’s efforts. German soldiers at the front waited for the wind to turn, then opened cylinders of chlorine gas. Even though they then ran away as quickly as possible, during the war it was realized that poison gas killed as many on the offensive side as it did on the defense. Besides being impractical, gas was thought immoral, and its use was stopped—a thoroughly fine analogy in every way to what would happen, another world war later, with nuclear weapons.

When Lise returned to KWI in 1917, her salary was raised to match Hahn’s, and she became head of her own physics department. With Hahn’s assistance through letters, she discovered protactinium, and in an echo of her self-denigrating behavior from her university years, she published those results as a team, even putting Hahn’s name first, though he wasn’t even physically present in the lab when she made the find. Twenty years later, when
both would be involved in the greatest discovery of their lifetimes, Otto Hahn would not return this favor. When in 1926 at the University of Berlin, Lise Meitner became the first female professor in the history of Germany, social misogyny remained in force; a lecture she gave on “cosmic physics” was written up in an academic review as being about “cosmetic physics.”

When
La Ricerca Scientifica
published Fermi’s irradiation findings in March and May of 1934, his discoveries reinvigorated the Joliot-Curies in Paris and Meitner-Hahn-Strassmann (Hahn’s new assistant) in Berlin. The competing German, French, and Italian teams, all firing neutron cannons at uranium targets, produced one new element or isotope after the next, chemically detected yet short-lived creatures that were even atomically fatter than naturally occurring uranium, which they called transuranes. In Rome, after the group’s chemist left to develop insecticides and Segrè departed for a job in Palermo, Fermi lost interest in transuranics, but Berlin and Paris battled, driving the science to new heights, churning out a torrent of experimental results, each side arriving at different interpretations for what was happening, and each claiming the other was inept. On January 20, 1938, Otto and Lise told Irène Curie that
“she had committed a gross error” in claiming to have produced a three-and-a-half-hour transuranic thorium isotope and said that if she didn’t release a “public retraction,” they would humiliate her themselves.

But in fact they were all wrong. Their radioactive chemistry was misreading a fundamental process, and though elements atomically grander than uranium would in time be artificially engineered (and called plutonium, americium, et al.), the transuranes themselves were a mirage. Only one scientist seemed to grasp what was happening, German chemist Ida Noddack, who wrote to Fermi, “One can imagine that when heavy nuclei are bombarded with neutrons, these nuclei break apart into several large fragments, which are indeed isotopes of known elements but not neighbors of the irradiated elements.” Noddack’s revolutionary concept was, though, only a side note in her criticism that Fermi hadn’t excluded such known elements as polonium in his chemical testing for transuranes. As she offered no proof of nuclei breaking apart into large fragments, no one in the physics community took this comment as revelatory. In fact, as Hungarian Quartet member Edward Teller explained,
“Fermi was a very careful experimenter. He covered his uranium with a thin sheet of inert material to stop the normal alpha particles (without the extra energy) in which he was not interested. That sheet also stopped the fission products, which had a short range but extremely high energy-density. Had Fermi forgotten to cover this sample even once, fission would have been discovered years earlier.”

While Meitner was making history as a woman physicist in the leafy Berlin suburb of Dahlem, outside that ivory tower in the economically collapsed Weimar Republic,
“mystics, magicians and religious fanatics drew followers desperate for rescue. Each was called a
Heiland
, or savior. But in German, there is no plural word for ‘savior.’ There can be only one,” as historian Nicole Rittenmeyer said. When on February 28, 1933, the Reichstag, Germany’s Capitol, was attacked by arsonists, President von Hindenburg ordered the “Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of the People and the State,” suspending private property, personal liberty, freedom of assembly, privacy, and press freedom, “until further notice.” Chancellor Hitler dissolved parliament, dismissed the Weimar constitution, and sent eight hundred thousand Germans to prisons or concentration camps. Six weeks later, on April 7, 1933, the anti-Semitic “Law for the Restoration of the Career Civil Service” was passed. Over the next three years, sixteen hundred scholars were fired or resigned, a third being scientists, twenty being Nobel laureates, and quarter of Germany’s physicists were exiled. Lise’s nephew Otto Robert Frisch lost his Rockefeller fellowship to study with Fermi in Rome since, on his return to Germany, he would no longer be employed. Szilard’s Academic Assistance Council got Frisch to Birkbeck in the UK, and after a short term he was able to join Niels Bohr in Copenhagen. Lise’s next-door neighbor, James Franck, could continue working because of his service in the Great War, but he resigned on principle as did Erwin Schrödinger.