{"id":88286,"date":"2019-03-01T18:23:31","date_gmt":"2019-03-02T02:23:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/03\/lise-meitner-is-the-forgotten-female-physicist-who-deserved-a-nobel-prize"},"modified":"2019-03-01T18:23:31","modified_gmt":"2019-03-02T02:23:31","slug":"lise-meitner-is-the-forgotten-female-physicist-who-deserved-a-nobel-prize","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/03\/lise-meitner-is-the-forgotten-female-physicist-who-deserved-a-nobel-prize","title":{"rendered":"Lise Meitner Is the Forgotten Female Physicist Who Deserved a Nobel Prize"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

Nuclear fission<\/a> \u2014 the physical process by which very large atoms like uranium split into pairs of smaller atoms \u2014 is what makes nuclear bombs<\/a> and nuclear power plants<\/a> possible. But for many years, physicists believed it energetically impossible for atoms as large as uranium (atomic mass = 235 or 238) to be split into two.<\/p>\n

That all changed on Feb. 11, 1939, with a letter to the editor<\/a> of Nature \u2014 a premier international scientific journal \u2014 that described exactly how such a thing could occur and even named it fission. In that letter, physicist Lise Meitner, with the assistance of her young nephew Otto Frisch<\/a>, provided a physical explanation of how nuclear fission could happen.<\/p>\n

It was a massive leap forward in nuclear physics, but today Lise Meitner remains obscure and largely forgotten. She was excluded from the victory celebration because she was a Jewish woman. Her story is a sad one.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nuclear fission \u2014 the physical process by which very large atoms like uranium split into pairs of smaller atoms \u2014 is what makes nuclear bombs and nuclear power plants possible. But for many years, physicists believed it energetically impossible for atoms as large as uranium (atomic mass = 235 or 238) to be split into [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-88286","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-military","category-particle-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88286","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=88286"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88286\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=88286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=88286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=88286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}