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Lise MeitnerA Action in PhysicsBy Ruth Lewin Sime
Chapter One: Girlhood in Vienna
And alike today I am abounding with abysmal acknowledgment for the abnormal advantage of my parents, and the abnormally aesthetic bookish atmosphere in which my sisters and brothers and I grew up.
Lise Meitner was built-in in Vienna in 1878, the third adolescent of Hedwig and Philipp Meitner. She would animate in Vienna twenty-nine years, and afresh she would leave, not acumen how permanently, to accomplish her able home in Berlin. Allotment of her remained sentimentally, irreversibly Viennese. She gave in to it, bedlam at herself anniversary time she paid the appropriate fee to advance her Austrian residency. “Na ja,” she would shrug. “Foolishness costs money.” And afterwards still, afterwards she fled Germany for Stockholm, afterwards every affiliate of her ancestors was gone from Vienna, afterwards the association from which she came was absent forever, alike afresh she clung to her Austrian past, abnegation to booty Swedish citizenship until she could accept both. Had she backward best in Vienna, she ability not, perhaps, accept remained so acerb bound.
Of Lise’s adolescence we accept few details. Alike her date of bearing is not absolutely certain. In the bearing annals of Vienna’s Jewish association it is listed as 17 November 1878, but on all added abstracts it is 7 November, the day Lise herself observed. It may be that her parents, already clashing about their Jewish affiliations, somehow delayed the record, or conceivably the alterity was alone a case of Schlamperei, that acclaimed blunder that contributed to Vienna’s charm. Neither account is satisfactory. Lise’s name additionally afflicted slightly, from its aboriginal Elise. In Berlin such things ability accept acquired a flurry of paperwork; in Vienna it fabricated no difference.
Like abounding of their generation, Lise’s parents were contempo arrivals in the capital, a move whose adroitness of approaching may explain their abridgement of assimilation to a abundant ancestors history. The Meitners traced themselves aback alone a few generations, to the apple of Meiethein in Moravia, the abundant arena arctic of Vienna that is now allotment of the Czech Republic. Adjoin the end of the eighteenth century, not connected afore the Rights of Man began afloat adjoin Austria, Absolutist Josef II accomplished a alternation of reforms brash to consolidate ability and defended the adherence of all his subjects: he mad German the official accent of government, concise the Church, gave peasants some abatement from serfdom, and accustomed Jews their aboriginal actual bound acceptance to borough employment, aggressive service, and education. The Kaiser’s altruism did not extend to his own environs–fewer than two hundred Jewish families were acceptable to animate in Vienna–but he absurd the ghetto walls, so that Jews abounding the schools, abutting the military, and looked to German accent md ability for its affiance of emancipation, opportunity, and humanism.
Among Absolutist Josef’s authoritative reforms was the claim of a ancestors name. Lise’s great-great,-grandfather took the name Meietheiner, an adumbration that the ancestors had lived in the apple a connected time; the name eventually beneath to Meitheiner, Meithner, Meitner. The ancestors lived modestly; if some accomplished appropriate distinction, it was for their appearance and acceptable deeds. Lise’s great-grandfather, it was told, crept through the boondocks afterwards aphotic every Friday night to lay a loaf of challah, the Sabbath bread, at the aperture of every poor Jew. He did this as secretly as accessible and did not admittance anyone to acknowledge him, but anybody knew it was the assignment of Reb Meitner. “Reb” did not beggarly “rabbi”–there were none in the Meitner family–but was a acceptable appellation of respect.
Reb Meitner’s son Moriz, Lise’s grandfather, affiliated Charlotte Kohn Lowy, a added with two babyish boys who had affiliated an inn, some property, and a bedfellow abode in the boondocks of Wsechowitz. Her granddaughters would bethink her as beautiful, able-bodied dressed, and as airy as she was self-disciplined. “The abode ability bake clown,” it was said, “and grandmother sings; there is cholera in the village, and still grandmother sings!” Moriz and Charlotte’s son, Philipp, was albino and babyish like his mother; like his grandfather, Beb Meitner, he would afterwards be accustomed for his candor and kindness. In 1873 he affiliated petite, dark-eyed Hedwig Skovran, whose grandfathering had emigrated from Russia to Slovakia to escape the advancing animality of Jews.
Philipp and Hedwig Meitner grew up with Austria’s alteration on from backward bullwork to a acutely avant-garde society. The avant-garde revolutions of 1848 were ashamed in Austria, but the attempt for alone freedoms and borough freedom went on. Industrialization came to Vienna and with it, a abundant centralized clearing from throughout the empire. In r858, the medieval fortifications campanology the old abutting burghal were broken down; in their abode came the arty Ringstrasse, admirable new accessible buildings, and a assembly with little absolute ability whose Avant-garde majority apprenticed for a avant-garde civilian accompaniment and built-in government. At a time aback the old adjustment was declining and the actual angle of authority was threatened by nationalist dissensions, the Habsburg absolution was ashamed by a cord of childish aggressive ventures and adept blunders. By 1867, Absolutist Franz Josef adored what he could by adding the authority md absolution Hungary go. He accustomed his bodies a cardinal of built-in laws: borough and religious toleration, a laissez-faire economy, an candid judiciary, greater alone freedoms of education, belief, speech, and press. For Jews, this meant abounding borough equality, including acceptance to professions from which they had avant-garde been barred. Philipp Meitner was amid the aboriginal accumulation of Jewish men who were chargeless to abstraction law and be accustomed to its practice.
In the twenty years from anarchy to architecture (so the adage went), Austria had been abject into the nineteenth century. By the time Lise Meitner was built-in in 1878, administrative Vienna was mostly “heater, set with palaces of absurd affluence and a Kaiser, the accustomed and abiding Franz Josef. It hardly mattered anymore. The new Vienna was alpha with action of its own, sprawling into the countryside, its citizenry acceleration and acceleration afresh with an arrival so connected that for ancestors best Viennese would be built-in about else: overwhelmingly Catholic with some Jews and around no Protestants, mostly German-speaking with abounding contingents of Czechs, Hungarians, Italians, Poles, Croats, Ukrainians, and others who retained their languages and borough identities in newspapers and indigenous associations. To abounding of the new arrivals, Vienna was a abode of adjoining assignment and abundant unemployment, baptize shortages, and summer cholera, with bottleneck so astringent that alike the affluent lived in apartments and the actual poor accumulated beds and slept in shifts. The best amalgamate burghal in Europe, it was amid the best awash and unsanitary; it had the accomplished amount of suicide. Still bodies came: altitude in the ambit were not better. Vienna at diminutive promised advance and pleasure: music of every sort, opera and “heater, newspapers by the dozens, a acclaimed university, acclaimed physicians and scientists, acceptable food, vineyards at the bend of town, and dejected hills ablaze hazily in the distance. If the Danube seemed addled or the flit overrated, Vienna was artful nonetheless, cartoon from every beck of European culture, layered with history and adorableness every newcomer could aspire to accomplish his own. The bookish agitate was actual great. By the end of the century, Vienna had accustomed bearing to Viktor Adler’s autonomous socialism and Theodor Herzl’s Zionism; it was the home Sigmund Freud admired to abhorrence and the political abject For Karl Lueger, the city’s longtime mayor, whose exciting mix of populism and anti-Semitism drew the absent assimilation of the adolescent Adolf Hitler. If the nineteenth aeon came backward to this society, the twentieth accustomed early.
When Philipp Meitner entered the acknowledged profession in the aboriginal 1870s, it was accessible not alone to convenance law but to accept a duke in the conception of a new political order. The new architecture alleged for across-the-board reforms of Austria’s absolute acknowledged system, and in Vienna, afterwards years of carelessness by Crown and Church, the Avant-garde burghal board congenital an abounding baptize accumulation and provided flood ascendancy and bigger accessible health, hospitals, and schools. It was a time aback advance seemed the accustomed adjustment of things, anniversary decade a apparent advance on the one before. As an attorney, “freethinker,” and humanist, Philipp Meitner was committed to the Avant-garde ethics of acumen and borough progress, affectionate to the Amusing Autonomous goals of amends and alone improvement. He captivated himself in Vienna’s political life. Although he never approved constituent office,he and Hedwig fabricated their home a acquisition abode for absorbing people-legislators, writers, chess players, lawyers. The accouchement backward up and listened. Years later, aback Lise was asked about her childhood, she remembered best of all “the abnormal advantage of my parents, and the abnormally aesthetic bookish atmosphere in which my brothers and sisters and I grew up.”
During Lise’s adolescence the ancestors lived in the additional district, accustomed as Leopoldstadt, above arctic above the Danube aqueduct from the old city. Originally a ghetto, the association was alleged for Leopold I, who expelled Vienna’s Jews in the 1600s, afresh grudgingly acceptable them to return. For the abutting two centuries, the cardinal of Jews in the basic remained small, but in the 1860s, aback abode restrictions were abolished and Jews from throughout the authority converged on Vienna, Leopoldstadt grew. Awash and abandoned in some areas, it was pleasant, alike somewhat prosperous, in others.
Lise was built-in in the ancestors accommodation at 27 Absolutist Josefstrasse, a tree-lined admission that traversed Leopoldstadt from a bartering commune at one end to the Prater, Vienna’s huge park, at the other. There on a Sunday the ancestors could adore amusements and cafes, abounding paths and accessible fields, and alike on break glimpse the absolutist benumbed by. On the accomplished Leopoldstadt was a adequate abode to accession a family. The aboriginal three Meitner children, Gisela, Auguste (Gust)), and Lise, were built-in alone a year apart, followed not absolutely so rapidly by bristles more: Moriz (Fritz), Carola (Lola), accession boy, Frida, and assuredly Walter, the babyish brother Lise adored, who was built-in in 1891. The abounding ancestors could allow few luxuries, but Philipp Meitner’s law convenance did accommodate the common essentials: books, a few summer weeks in the mountains, and–virtually a call in Vienna–music lessons. Gusti was the family’s best accomplished musician, a adolescent prodigy who became a artisan and pianist of concert rank. Lise played the piano too; all her action music would be a amore for her, as all-important as food. But she was abnormally analytic about mathematics and science, an eight-year-old who kept a algebraic angle beneath her pillow and would ask about the colors of an oil glossy and bethink what she was told about attenuate films and the arrest furnishings of reflected light. In this ancestors accouchement were apparent and heard–and accustomed to anticipate for themselves. Once, aback Lise was still actual young, her grandmother warned her never to sew on the Sabbath, or the blast would appear aerobatics down. Lise was accomplishing some adornment at the time and absitively to accomplish a test. Placing her aggravate on the embroidery, she ashore above the tip of it in and glanced anxiously at the sky, took a stitch, waited again, and then, affronted that there would be no objections from above, acquiescently went on with her work. Forth with books, summer hikes, and music, a assertive rational skepticism was a connected of Lise’s adolescence years.
Judaism was not one of those constants. In Leopoldstadt the Meitner accouchement lived amid Jews, in a adjacency dotted with synagogues and shuls, absolutely acquainted that they too were of Jewish origin. And yet it is ablaze that the ancestors distanced itself from its Jewish past. One of Lise’s nephews. Gusti’s son, Otto Robert Frisch, would afterwards accept the abutting consequence that his mother and all the Meitner accouchement had been baptized and aloft as Protestants. In fact, this was not so: the accouchement were all registered with the Jewish association at bearing and accustomed ablution alone as adults–Lola and Gisela as Catholics in 1908, Lise as Protestant the aforementioned year. But Frisch’s consequence was in aspect true: the Meitners did leave the old adoration for the new.
Their affidavit were never absolutely stated. Opportunism was allegedly not one of them: Philipp and Hedwig Meitner never baptized their accouchement or themselves and appropriately acquired none of the advantages about-face would accept offered, decidedly in the acknowledged profession area bigotry remained able and about-face was still a authorization to judgeships and added civilian account positions. One can alone accept that the Meitner brace absent assimilation in Judaism, apropos it as a ghetto antique perhaps, or an abominable indigenous division; they absolutely acquainted little alikeness with Leopoldstadt’s abounding Ostjuden, Jews from Galicia and added Austrian-held Polish ambit whose language, dress, and acquiescence set them apart. Enlightened and progressive, Hedwig and Philipp Meitner were fatigued to German culture; afresh emancipated, with optimism adjoining on faith, they accustomed the ability that freed them. By the about-face of the century, such optimism allegation accept dimmed somewhat, as the best absorbing Viennese ambassador of all time, the handsome Karl Lueger (der schone Karl), rallied his voters by ambrosial to their Catholicism, nationalism, and anti-Semitism. It is account acquainted that none of the Meitner accouchement followed their ancestor into politics, or alike law. But their parents, celebrity afflicted them nonetheless. It was allotment of the “unusual goodness” Lise remembered, the base for the amazing bookish atmosphere that accomplished Lise and the added accouchement in their parents, home.
In this atmosphere all the Meitner children, including the bristles daughters, pursued an avant-garde education. Alike today such a ancestors almanac would be notable, but at the time it was absolutely extraordinary, for until the end of the nineteenth aeon women were by law afar from Austrian universities and, by the aforementioned logic, from accurate accessory schools as well. While a ablaze boy ability appear a Gymnasium and booty the Matura, a abrogation assay that was appropriate afore entering the university, accessible academy for girls was over at age fourteen, and it was poor. Lise abounding the Madchen-Burgerschule at Czerninplatz, a awash inter area not far from home. On 15 July 1892, she accustomed her final Fahres-Zeugnis, a address agenda that was additionally an Entlassungs-Zeugnis, a achievement certificate. She had abstruse accounting accession but not algebra, a drop of history, geography, and science, the requisite drawing, singing, and “feminine handwork,” a little French and gymnastics. Although her grades were all acceptable and her behavior “entirely appropriate” (vollkommen entsprechend), her action was rated alone “satisfactory” (befriedigend) rather than “industrious” (ausdauernd), an adumbration that she did not acquisition academy actual challenging. Inked at the basal of her Jahres-Zeugnis was the line: “vom weiteren Schulbesuch befreit” (released from added schooling). Lise had gone as far in accessible academy as an Austrian babe could go.
Not yet fourteen, her choices were few. Best girls would absorb the abutting few years allowance at home, sewing, and captivated of marriage. The alone way for a babe to go on was to appear a clandestine hohere Tochterschule for adolescent ladies of the average class; the alone profession she could seek was teaching a accountable that did not crave university education. Lise chose French. Annihilation in her abreast annal or afterwards memoirs indicates that she anytime had a absolute assimilation in it. Instead, she lavished her action and adulation on her babyish brother, Walter; he would consistently be her abutting sibling. She additionally accomplished adolescent girls to admonition pay for Gusti’s avant-garde music acquaint and volunteered with the poor in abatement organizations and schools.
Of these years Lise would bethink little but a adroitness of loss. “Although I had a actual apparent angled for mathematics and physics from my aboriginal years, I did not activate a action of abstraction immediately,” she wrote later. “Thinking aback to . . . the time of my youth, one realizes with some amazement how abounding problems afresh existed in the lives of accustomed adolescent girls, which now assume about unimaginable. Amid the best difficult of these problems was the achievability of accustomed bookish training.”
In Austria the affair of college apprenticeship for women had been animate for a generation, absolutely aback 1867 aback universities were aboriginal opened to men afterwards assimilation to bread-and-butter class, religion, or national-origin. Over the years a babyish cardinal of women had approached the universities, petitioned professors, begged to appear a chic or two. At best they were acceptable to sit in as actionable auditors, not assured and absolutely never accepting any acclaim or documentation. Best of these women were agents whose above-mentioned apprenticeship did not authorize them for university admission. But alike the few who did qualify–occasionally a adolescent woman from Bohemia or Austrian Poland would somehow administer to appear her bounded Gymnasium and canyon the Matura–were additionally denied admission. Daughters of the affluent and the elite were commonly accomplished in Switzerland. The draft were trapped in a aeon absolute by the state: aback the universities (all accessible institutions) afar women, the government did not see fit to authorize schools that would adapt women for university admission. In Europe, alone Germany and Turkey offered added attrition to women’s education.
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, however, the attrition began to falter. Women’s groups, about led by headmistresses of girls, schools, consistently petitioned for bigger accessory education; a clandestine Madchengymnasium was accustomed in Vienna in 1891 alike admitting its graduates were not acceptable to booty the Matura; the government itself, actively defective changeable physicians for Moslem women in alive Bosnia and Herzegovina, recruited adopted women for abounding years, assassin the aboriginal Austrian (Swiss-trained) in 1892, but still denied medical acceptance to added Swiss-trained Austrian women physicians who admired to admission clandestine practice, although, at the aforementioned time, a awful competent eye surgeon who was built-in in Russia and accomplished in Zurich accustomed appropriate permission from the Absolutist to authorize a dispensary with her bedmate in Salzburg. Publicity accompanied anniversary case, and assessment gradually softened. It seemed plausible, finally, to accept that in Austria–as in America, France, and Switzerland–women could be accomplished afterwards adversity brainy affliction or infertility or amusing catastrophe. By the mid-1890s, alike bourgeois university advisers admired women acceptance as a flood that could no best be had back. In 1897 the government accustomed women acceptance to the abstract commonsense (letters and sciences) of Austrian universities; a few years afterwards women were accustomed to medical schools as well.
With this, the aeon of exclusion was befuddled into reverse. Justice, and the allegation for university accomplished women teachers, appropriate that universities accept women at once, alike afterwards Gymnasium preparation. For the acting women would be appropriate alone to canyon the Matura, any way they could. This came as acceptable news–late, but not too late–for Lise and her sisters.
Gisela, already twenty-one, came first. Afterwards two years of accelerated clandestine lessons, Gisela anesthetized the Matura and entered medical academy in 1900. Lise meanwhile completed her abecedary training (as insurance, her ancestor advised) and in 1899 began her own acquaint in a accumulation with two added adolescent women. Together they aeroembolism eight missing academy years into two: Greek and Latin, mathematics and physics, botany, zoology, mineralogy, psychology, logic, religion, German literature, history. Lise brash night and day. “You’ll fail,”her adolescent brothers and sisters would tease. “You’ve above absolved above the allowance afterwards acrimonious up a book.” A photograph shows a anemic adolescent woman with aphotic circles beneath her eyes.
For physics and mathematics, Lise’s accumulation was accomplished by Arthur Szarvassy, a adolescent physicist who had above completed his doctorate at the University of Vienna.
Dr. Szarvasy [sic] had a absolute allowance for presenting the accountable amount of mathematics and physics in an abnormally aesthetic manner. Sometimes he was able to appearance us accoutrement in the Vienna University [Physics] Institute, a abnormality in clandestine coaching–usually all one was accustomed were abstracts and diagrams of apparatus. I allegation acknowledge that I did not consistently get actual account from these, and today it amuses me to anticipate of the amazement with which I saw assertive accoutrement for the aboriginal time.
Lise took the Matura in July 1901 at the Akademisches Gymnasium, a acclaimed boys’ academy on-Beethovenplatz in the old city. The advance of abstraction had been so acute and the assay altitude so terrifying–as Externisten (outside students), Lise and the added women were brash in aberrant ambience by agents they had never met-that Lise never bootless to acknowledgment it inkier afterwards remembrances. Of fourteen who took the exam, alone four passed; three were the acceptance of Dr. Szarvassy. The fourth was Henriette Boltzmann, whose ancestor would anon be a determinative access in Lise’s life.
Lise would consistently anticipate of Arthur Szarvassy as her aboriginal accurate teacher. And she was beholden to her parents, who fabricated it accessible for her to accomplish what few added adolescent women of her bearing could.
Many parents accumulated the ageism of the time adjoin [women’s] education, so that their daughters either had to abandon the apprenticeship they desired, or action for it. . . . [I knew] a adolescent woman who at age Z4 basic to be abreast accomplished by her accessory to adapt for the Matura; her parents-in added respects actual loving, I’m sure-literally kept her captive in their accommodation to accumulate her from accustomed out her intentions. On y aback she abolished from the accommodation one day and let her parents apperceive that she would not acknowledgment unless she had permission to study, did they accord in.
Although Lise herself had no such obstacles, she sensed that for her mother, at least, it was not consistently easy.
I had the action thee in the beginning, aback aboriginal my beforehand sister, and afresh I anesthetized the Matura, that my mother was inwardly somewhat depressed by it. But she was abundant too admiring a mother anytime to accurate it in any way.
From her ancestor there was no such ambivalence. On the contrary, he was a abiding antecedent of abutment and advice.
Even as a adolescent I was acerb captivated in mathematics and physics, and as I grew up I additionally developed a actual arresting amore for amusing responsibility. . . . Aback I was 23 years old and about to admission the university, I entertained the abstraction of primarily advancing medicine, for its amusing usefulness, and belief mathematics and physics alone at the side. My ancestor kept me from this incorrect best by authoritative it ablaze to me that such a advance of abstraction ability be accessible for a ability like Hermann Helmholtz, but not for accession person.
Lise entered the University of Vienna in October 1901. Babyish and slender, with a absent announcement and austere aphotic eyes, she looked adolescent than her twenty-three years. A dejected stocking, her nephew would adjudicator later, a adolescent woman who cared for annihilation but study. He was allegedly right. Anxious to accomplish up for absent time, Lise abounding her university allotment book with physics, calculus, chemistry, and botany–twenty-five hours a anniversary of lectures, laboratories, affirmation and altercation sections.
No doubt, like abounding added adolescent students, I began by accessory too abounding lectures. . . . I cannot say I accept a actual alive bond of the lectures on beginning physics. These were delivered about afterwards experiments, amid apex and one P.M., aback best of the acceptance were already actual tired. Sometimes I was absolutely abashed I would blooper off my chair.
But for calculus, at eight o,clock in the morning, she was awake.
My aboriginal appellation I brash cogwheel and basic calculus with Abettor Gegenbauer. In my additional appellation he asked me to ascertain an absurdity in the assignment of an Italian mathematician. About I bare his ample abetment afore I begin the error, and aback he attentive appropriate to me that I ability like to broadcast this assignment on my own, I acquainted it would be amiss to do so, and so abominably affronted him forever.
Here was Lise, a first-year student, abnegation to broadcast as her acclaimed abettor asked. -Assertive in one way, self-deprecating in another–neither to her bookish advantage. “This adventure did accomplish it ablaze to me, however, that I basic to become a physicist, not a mathematician.”
In fact, the physics advance Lise attended, her blackout nothwithstanding, had the acceptability of actuality awfully able-bodied taught. It had been brash for pharmacy students, but Abettor Franz Exner brought such accuracy and angle to the accountable that acceptance from all disciplines awash to it. The class was directed by Anton Lampa, a able adolescent physicist and teacher. Lise may accept been comatose in lecture, but she vividly remembered the laboratory: the somewhat above instructor, the archaic equipment, the abstracts acute ice that could be done alone aback there was snow in the courtyard below. For this adolescent woman who had never had science in school, whose alone antecedent appointment with accoutrement was to appearance it with astonishment, the class was of ascendant interest. She would abstraction physics afterwards all.
The physics convention was on the Turkenstrasse, a abbreviate ancillary artery in Vienna’s ninth district, on the aforementioned block as the institutes for biologic allure and alleviative chemistry, not far from the acclaimed medical academy and its clinics. The university had no axial campus; its barrio were interspersed amid the residences and shops of the neighborhood. A photographer’s flat and a coffee abode stood on either ancillary of Turkenstrasse 3; Sigmund Freud lived and formed on the abrupt Berggasse nearby. Originally the anatomy had been a babyish accommodation house, already abandoned aback the university purchased it as a acting architecture in 1875 (a abiding physics architecture opened in 1913). Its access reminded Lise Meitner of the aperture to a hen house. “I about thought, ‘If a blaze break out here, actual few of us will get out alive.'” Inside were beat stairs and all-a-quiver floors, makeshift laboratories with untold amounts of mercury in the attic cracks, a address allowance with neither belvedere nor desks, axle beams so rotten they looked as admitting they had been chewed by termites.
The address halls in accurate were absolute life-threatening. This was so broadly accustomed that the Viennese bi-weekly Arbeiterzeitung already agitated this notice: “Once afresh a apprentice has registered at the Physics Convention on the Turkenstrasse; dejection in adulation is said to be the motive for the deed.”
But in that bare architecture the amore of teaching and analysis was actual high. Exner, the aboriginal abettor acceptance encountered, was a able beginning physicist whose analysis included electrochemistry, atmospheric electricity, bright physics, spectroscopy, and optics. A acquaintance of Wilhelm Rontgen, Exner had alien x-ray analysis and its medical applications to Vienna; one of the aboriginal to booty an assimilation in redioactivity, Exner anchored uranium ore residues for Marie and Pierre Curie, accustomed an accomplished radium sample in return, and fabricated Vienna an aboriginal centermost for radioactivity research. Although Exner lectured alone to first-year students, he directed the avant-garde physics laboratories and supervised a:large cardinal of doctoral candidates. One of Lise’s adolescent students, Karl Przibam, remembered Exner for his catching action and for the association spirit that went far above the accustomed accord amid abecedary and students.
This adroitness of association was basic for Lise in award her way. She had appear to the university on her own, actual acquainted of how few women there were and how arresting she was, how some of the men weary-out of their way to be affable and others, above as conspicuously, did the opposite. Never accepting gone to a-Gymnasium, she could alone brainstorm that she had absent some basic aspect of accustomed apprentice life, in academics, perhaps, or apprentice friendships, or relationships with teachers. With Abettor Gegenbauer she had allegedly been awkward and afresh ashamed by her awkwardness; not accessible to be singled out, she bare aboriginal to be assertive that she could be a apprentice like any other.
For Lise, this happened in the old architecture on the Turkenstrasse, in the anarchic laboratory, during the breezy banter of agents and students. It helped that the accountable was difficult, alleged alone by a few. In Vienna, absolutely worldwide, the cardinal of physicists was small; about all were affianced in teaching and research, actual few in business or industry. Physics was added a calling than a career. Acceptance who committed themselves to physics did so because they could not brainstorm a added alluring way to absorb their lives. By 1902, Lise Meitner knew she was one of them.
In her additional university year, she began belief physics in earnest. Over the abutting six semesters, her Meldungsbuch lists analytic mechanics, electricity and magnetism, animation and hydrodynamics, acoustics, optics, thermodynamics, and alive theory-of gases as able-bodied as algebraic physics anniversary division and a advance in aesthetics of science. A adequately archetypal curriculum, it was awful abnormal in one respect: all of it was accomplished by above one person, the abstract physicist Ludwig Baltzmann.
Fifty years afterwards Lise Meitner would still bethink Boltzmann’s lectures as “the best admirable and aesthetic that I accept anytime heard. . . . He himself was so agog about accumulated he accomplished us that one larboard every address with the action that a absolutely new and admirable apple had been revealed.”
One can hardly brainstorm a bigger abecedary for the diminutive apple that lay ahead. In 1902 Boltzmann was fifty-eight years old, the acclaimed abstract physicist who had extended-kinetic access and accustomed statistical mechanics, the arch “atomist” who tied*he additional law of thermodynamics to diminutive access by assuming that the inherent irreversibility of accustomed processes arises from the statistical behavior of atoms in the aggregate. The angle of airy atoms with general behavior was added than some scientists could swallow. For years Boltzmann was affected to avert his assignment adjoin the adequately boundless aesthetics of accurate authoritativeness that denied the amount of accurate access and the absoluteness of annihilation that could not be anon observed.
A big man, heavy, actual nearsighted, with coiled amber bristles and a abounding brownish bristles that affected his ample face, Boltzmann affronted account and amore in his students. He began his mechanics advance in 1902 by alms his acceptance “everything! have: myself, my absolute way of cerebration and feeling,” and allurement the aforementioned of them: “strict attention, adamant discipline, alive backbone of mind. But absolve me if I [first] ask you for that which agency best to me: for your trust, your affection, your love–in a word, for the best you accept the ability to give, yourself.”
Like abounding of the others, Lise was swept away. He was badly engaging, she remembered, this acclaimed abettor whose lectures were models of clarity, this accommodating Hofrat (Excellency) who would absolve at his appellation and laugh, “Ach, how impaired of me!” at his blackboard errors.
Boltzmann had no inhibitions whatsoever about assuming his action aback he spoke, and this artlessly agitated his admirers along. He was addicted of introducing animadversion of an absolutely claimed appearance into his lectures. I decidedly bethink how, in anecdotic the alive access of gases, he told us how abundant adversity and action he had encountered because he had been assertive of the absolute actuality of atoms and how he had been attacked from the abstract ancillary afterwards consistently compassionate what the philosophers captivated adjoin him. . . . I admiration what he would say about our huge machines and teamwork [today], aback I bethink how bitterly he complained . . . about the abundant addendum of the accountable amount of physics and the connected overspecialization. He declared actually that [Hermann] Helmholtz was the aftermost physicist who had been able to accept an all-embracing appearance of the accomplished subject.
His accord to acceptance was actual personal. . . . He not alone saw to their ability of physics, but approved to accept their character. Formalities meant annihilation to him, and he had no anxiety about cogent his feelings. The few acceptance who took allotment in the avant-garde academy were arrive to his abode from time to time. There he would comedy for us–he was a actual acceptable pianist–and acquaint us all sorts of claimed experiences.
Boltzmann accustomed women acceptance as a amount of course. In 1872, connected afore women were accustomed to Austrian universities, he met Henriette von Aigentler, an ambitious abecedary of mathematics and physics in Graz From their four-year accord we apperceive of her admiration to appear the university (“out of alacrity to apprentice and to authorize for teaching”), how she was banned permission to unofficially analysis lectures (an ambassador declared himself “delighted” to accumulate women out, aback “the appearance of the university would be absent and the academy endangered” by their presence), that Boltzmann brash her to address (she did, successfully), and that aback he proposed marriage, finally, he began, “It seems to me that a connected adulation cannot abide if the wife has no understanding, no action for the endeavors of the husband, but is alone his charwoman rather than the accompaniment in his struggles.”
Lise may accept heard some of this; she came to apperceive his wife and daughters and advised their ancestors action harmonious. In any case, her university years were chargeless of -he obstacles she had encountered beforehand and the difficulties that lay ahead. With his ability and spirit, Boltzmann created a association to which she absolutely belonged. “He was in a way a ,pure soul” abounding of advantage of heart, idealism, and admiration for the admiration of the accustomed adjustment of things.”
All who were abutting to Boltzmann were additionally acquainted of his bouts of astringent abasement and his suicide attempts. His acceptance abhorrent it on the absinthian altercation over whether atoms existed, in which Boltzmann acquired abounding adherents amid adolescent scientists but never the achievement of acceptable his opponents. It was not that simple. Boltzmann himself jestingly attributed his accelerated changes in attitude to the actuality that he was built-in during the night amid Shrove Tuesday and Ash Wednesday: he was, about certainly, manic-depressive. But he was additionally actual sensitive. As Meitner reflected, “[He] may accept been blood-soaked by abounding things a added able-bodied actuality would accept hardly noticed. . . . I accept he was such a able abecedary above because of his aberrant humanity.”
Boltzmann’s bookish career was a alternation of wanderings. Built-in in Vienna in 1844, he accelerating from the Akademisches Gymnasium, area Lise Meitner and additionally his daughter, Henriette, afterwards took their Matura. At the University of Vienna, he was a apprentice of Josef Loschmidt (1821-1895), who fabricated reliable aboriginal estimates of diminutive admeasurement and the cardinal of molecules per mole, and he was abettor to Josef Stefan (1835-1893), who devised an empiric blueprint for atramentous anatomy radiation that Boltzmann afterwards gave a abstract basis. Amid 1869 and 1890, Boltzmann captivated accessories in Graz, afresh Vienna, afresh Graz again, a aeon during which he contributed to all branches of abstract physics: electromagnetic theory, alive theory, the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution, statistical mechanics. He went to Munich in 1890, alternate to Vienna as Stefan’s almsman in 1894, larboard for Leipzig in 1900, and came aback afresh in 1902. The university had kept his position accessible in the apprehension that he would return.
Boltzmann was broken amid his adapter to Austria, abnormally Vienna, and the attractions of German universities. Meitner recalled that Boltzmann would acquaint how in Munich there was “wonderful equipment, but far beneath acceptable ideas” than in Vienna and afresh agilely add, “One allegation not let the Austrian [education] admiral apperceive that acceptable assignment can sometimes be done with inferior equipment.” Of all universities, he best adopted Berlin, for its acute accurate atmosphere and the attendance of Hermann Holmholtz, whom Boltzmann admired as the greatest physicist of the nineteenth century. Yet in 1888 he banned the action of a armchair in Berlin, in allotment out of affair for his health, in part, it was said, because he awful the academism of the Prussian capital. Afterwards he would acquaint his acceptance how abundant he regretted that decision. The position he banned went to a adolescent abstract physicist, Max Planck.
A year afterwards Boltzmann came to Vienna in 1894, he was abutting on the adroitness by one of his arch accurate adversaries, the appalling Ernst Mach. The arch backer of the aesthetics of accurate positivism, Mach argued that science can do no added than conduct positive–that is, direct–observations: while accurate access may be of use for acclimation such data, it allegation not actualize “pictures,” as he alleged it, of basal reality. Mach’s catalyst was antimetaphysical, a acknowledgment adjoin nineteenth-century attempts to abate all of physics to automated principles; he against the alive access of gases, based as it was on diminutive motion, and absolved the actuality of atoms in ample Viennese, “‘Ave y’seen one of ’em?” In the 1890s, according to Boltzmann, the attitude adjoin the gas access was “malevolent,” complete with affronted debates at meetings, struggles for the adherence of adolescent scientists, fights over accessories to commonsense and journals. In axial Europe especially, Mach admiring a ample following, including “energeticists” led by the concrete chemist Wilhelm Ostwald, for whom action was the primary absoluteness and the additional law of thermodynamics superfluous. For his part, Boltzmann attacked authoritativeness as a avant-garde adaptation of an “old aberration,” action drudge to the aesthetics of George Berkeley. In 1905 he visited a university in California whose campus he declared as “the loveliest abode one can imagine,” except for its “philosophical aura”: “The name Berkeley is that of a awful accounted English [sic] philosopher who is acclaimed for the greatest absurdity anytime hatched by the animal brain, abstract idealism, which denies the actuality of the actual world.”
In 1898 Mach suffered a stroke, and he retired from teaching in 1901. Aback Boltzmann alternate to Vienna m 1902, he claimed the aesthetics of science advance that had been Mach’s for abounding years. Boltzmann’s countdown aesthetics address in 1903 was awash by the press, students, including Lise Meitner, and six hundred “sensation-seekers.” With his antecedent in mind, Boltzmann accepted to his “dislike, alike abhorrence of philosophy,” comparing it to “a anointed abstinent . . . [shad will abide consistently barren” as connected as it denies the actuality of concrete reality. Appropriately the hostilities amid the diminutive theorists and the followers of Mach went on.
But the altercation over the absoluteness of atoms was advancing an end. The analysis of radioactivity in 1896 and the electron in 1897 adapted atoms from acknowledged specks of accumulation to circuitous structures that were divisible, measurable, arranged with amazing amounts of centralized energy, and composed of axiological particles of electric charge. “No physicist today believes atoms are indivisible,” Boltzmann told an admirers at the World’s Fair in St. Louis in 1904. That was allegedly accurate for these who believed in atoms, but not all physicists did, yet. The final draft came afterwards Albert Einstein in 1905 end administrator Perrin in 1908 fabricated abundant studies of Brownian motion, the accidental movement of particles abeyant in a liquid, arresting beneath the microscope. By apropos the movement of the abeyant particles to the cardinal and action of the molecules in the aqueous that were hitting them from one ancillary or another, Einstein and Perrin acquired a amount for the cardinal of molecules in a birthmark that was connected with other, altered experiments. The absolute accord amid the calefaction action of atoms and the automated action of arresting Brownian particles gave complete acceptance to Boltzmann’s estimation of thermodynamic laws. And somehow it fabricated atoms about arresting and actual real. Ostwald was assertive and in 1908 conceded; it is ambiguous if Mach anytime did afore he died in 1916.
The altercation fabricated apparent to acceptance that accurate endeavor is not coldly cold but relies on animal judgment. From Boltzmann, Lise Meitner accepted physics to be a amorous allegation of intellect, strength, and integrity. Abounding years afterwards her nephew Otto Robert Frisch wrote, “Boltzmann gave her the eyes of physics as a action for ultimate truth, a eyes she never lost.”
Meitner’s ambition in physics would be abstract understanding; her means, about always, would be experiment. In the summer of 1905, her coursework completed, she began her doctoral research. In Austrian and German universities the apriorism analysis for a doctorate about took no added than a few months to complete. She chose an beginning project, beneath Franz Exner and his assistant, Hans Benndorf, undoubtedly-because she basic the class acquaintance but also, perhaps, because Boltzmann was lecturing in California that summer and had been absolutely ill afore he left.
In her research, Lise bent that Maxwell’s blueprint for the admonition of electricity in an inhomogeneous solid additionally applies to the admonition of heat. Her inhomogeneous solid, an emulsion-a cautiously disconnected mixture–of mercury aerosol anchored in fat, was layered amid two accumbent chestnut plates, on which was laid a third chestnut bowl that was cloistral from the basal two. The temperature of the basal bowl W&S kept connected by a beck of alive water; aback the top bowl was acrimonious by steam, three strategically placed thermometers in the chrism abstinent the temperature acclivity as the calefaction flowed through. Exner was pleased, commending her for a “not absoluteness easy” analysis that was brought to achievement “not afterwards beginning skill.” Her dissertation, “Test of a Blueprint of Maxwell’s,” was appear beneath the appellation “Conduction of Calefaction in Inhomogeneous Solids” in the affairs of the Vienna Physics Institute. Agreement abutting to theory, it embodied her afterwards access to physics. Personally, however, Exner’s access seems to accept been slight: in her afterwards memoirs she mentions him alone in passing, never with the affectionate appellation Doktorvater that German-speaking acceptance about use. Best allegedly Boltzmann’s personality eclipsed all others. Both men took allotment in her Rigorosen, the articulate examinations that she took in December 1905 and anesthetized summa cum laude. She was awarded her doctoral amount on I February 1900.
It was the average of the bookish year and Lise begin herself somewhat at apart ends. At the time Paul Ehrenfest, a abstract physicist her own age who had taken his doctorate beneath Boltzmann a few years before, was in Vienna. Aback he heard that Lise had taken abundant addendum of all Boltzmann’s lectures, he appropriate they abstraction his account as able-bodied as the assignment of others in analytic dynamics. Ehrenfest had a allowance for answer abstract physics; he alleged Lise’s assimilation to Lord Rayleigh’s accurate papers, in accurate an commodity on eyes that declared an agreement the British physicist could not explain. Meitner not alone explained it but additionally predicted some consequences, accepted them experimentally, and declared them in her report, “Some Conclusions Acquired from the Fresnel Reflection Formula.” Added than her apriorism project, this analysis assertive her that she was able of absolute accurate work.
While affianced in the eyes study, she additionally absitively to apprentice article of the beginning procedures acclimated in the new acreage of radioactivity. She had taken an avant-garde academy on the accountable from Egon von Schweidler the year before; now she became acquainted with Stefan Meyer, an abettor in Boltzmann’s convention who was alone six years her chief and already absolutely able-bodied accustomed in the field. At Meyer’s suggestion, Meitner abstinent the assimilation of alpha and beta radiation in foils of assorted metals. By June she completed the study, accepting been alien to several radioactive substances, the abstract of radioactivity, and a new instrument, the blade electroscope.
It was the summer of 1906, a time to appraise her future. For the adolescent woman who had above become Dr. Lise Meitner, the approaching was not abundant clearer than it had been at age fourteen. As the additional woman to acquire a doctorate in physics from the university, she knew of na affairs for a woman in physics; it seemed absolutely accessible she ability never assignment as a scientist. In Austria there had as yet been no changeable Assistent, the aboriginal position on the bookish ladder; there were no women’s colleges like those in America with positions for a few women scientists, no abundant likelihood of a job in industry. Of course, Lise had heard of Marie Curie, who had won the 19033 Nobel Award-winning in physics with her husband, Pierre, and Henri Becquerel; if she additionally knew of Curie’s astronomic able difficulties in Paris and how little the award-winning had alleviated them, she would not accept been encouraged. At one point she wrote to Marie Curie about workin in her laboratory, but there was no position available. There seemed no best but to chase her father’s admonition already afresh and access the accreditation all-important to acquire a living. She alive up for convenance teaching at a girls, school. Teaching did not address to her. Great, conceivably insurmountable, obstacles stood in the way for a woman in science. There was no aisle to follow.
Late that summer, on 5 September 1906, the physics association was abashed by the account that Ludwig Boltzmann had taken his life. En a accolade to his acquaintance and accurate opponent, Wilhelm Ostwald declared Boltzmann as a victim of the immense sacrifices of bloom and backbone accepted of those who attempt for accurate truth. Lise Meitner, added realistically, ascribed his suicide to “mental instability”; she never accepted it. But it seems acceptable that Boltzmann’s afterlife adequate her assurance to abide in physics, so that the atom he had afire in her would abide alive.
In the abatement of 1906, therefore, she connected alive with Stefan Meyer, who briefly took over Boltzmann’s institute. By day she accomplished school; in the black she alternate to Turkenstrasse 3. During that year she became accustomed with radioactivity research, although she had no accurate ambition of specializing in it.
One of the ancient workers in the field, Meyer had been investigating the alluring backdrop of assorted elements aback polonium, radium, and afresh actinium were apparent in the Curies, class in 1899. With von Schweidler, he advised the radiation emitted by the new elements; application a alluring acreage to avert the radiation, they apparent that beta radiation consists of particles with abrogating charge, a analysis fabricated at about the aforementioned time by Henri Becquerel in France and Friedrich Giesel in Germany. A year afterwards Becquerel abstinent their charge-to-mass adjustment and accepted that beta rays–more correctly, beta particles–are identical to electrons. In a agnate experiment, Meyer and von Schweidler brash the alpha radiation from polonium but were clumsy to axle a deflection; a few years afterwards Ernest Rutherford would use stronger magnets to actuate that alpha particles are absolutely charged.
Meyer remained in radioactivity. He accustomed that the abstruse “induced activity” that aboriginal workers had begin throughout their laboratories was due to radium, thorium, or actinium abounding a radioactive gas–Rutherford alleged it “emanation”–that diffused into the air and afresh addle to a solid that coated altar all over the laboratory. The solid, additionally radioactive, was thereafter termed the “active deposit.” (For the radioactive adulteration series, see Appendix fig. I.) In those -ear y years of radioactivity research, Meyer additionally brash the concrete furnishings of radiation, such as blush changes in minerals.
In 1900, four years afterwards the analysis of radioactivity, the cardinal of accustomed radioactive breed stood at five: the elements uranium, thorium, polonium, radium, and actinium. Aback Lise Meitner began analysis in 1905, the cardinal was over twenty and rising–most confusing, aback at aboriginal every new radioactive actuality was anticipation to be a new aspect (the actuality of isotopes was not absolutely accepted until about 1913, aback it became ablaze that it was accessible for altered radioactive breed to be chemically identical). In addition, the accord amid radioactive substances was not understood, and little was accustomed about their radiation. And yet, anarchic as it was, the acreage was inviting, for a newcomer bare little added than a radioactive antecedent and a barometer accessory to bound ascertain a new action or apprentice article new about its radiation.
In Vienna the adopted apparatus for radiation abstracts was the blade electroscope. A simple device, it consisted of a actual attenuate gold or aluminum blade attached to a metal rod whose end protruded from an amid alembic into which it was sealed. Aback the rod was accustomed an electric charge, the gold blade was repelled abroad from the rod; aback a radioactive actuality was brought near, its radiation would ionize the surrounding air, the allegation on the metal rod and the gold blade would aperture away, and the blade would alight to its comatose position, the amount of coast actuality a admeasurement of the backbone of the radiation. Franz Exner had bigger the electroscope for awful acute abstracts of atmospheric radiation; Julius Elster and Hans Geitel had added a mirror, a scale, and a accumulative glass. The electroscope was a acute instrument, readily adapted for alpha, beta, or gamma radiations; its disadvantages included the mind-numbing banality of the abstracts and the airiness of the metal leaf. Karl Przibam recalled “how acid it was aback [the electroscope] was not anxiously answerable and the little gold blade hit the top and got stuck, or alike tore off!”
In Meitner’s aboriginal study, done in the bounce of 1906, she abstinent the assimilation in several metals of alpha and beta radiation emitted by the alive deposits of thorium and actinium; she found, as others had, that alpha radiation exhibits a categorical ambit in anniversary metal, admitting the added biting beta radiation tapers off gradually. Although she acicular to the accent of assimilation studies for compassionate the attributes of the radiation, she presented her abstracts afterwards apperception on their meaning.
Now, in backward 1906, Meitner angry to the catechism of whether alpha particles are alone captivated as they canyon through matter, or whether they are additionally broadcast to some extent. A cardinal of scientists, including Marie Curie and Rutherford had begin affirmation of scattering, but W. H. Bragg acknowledged these findings. The catechism was of ample assimilation for acquirements article of the nature-of alpha particles and additionally the amount through which they passed; Rutherford had already acclaimed that drop “brings out acutely the actuality that the atoms of amount allegation be the bench of actual acute electrical forces.” Meitner devised an adjustment by which a axle of alpha particles was collimated–made parallel–by casual through a array of tiny metal tubes, afresh accustomed to access a metal foil, and afresh collimated afresh by accession array of tubes some ambit away. The abrasion of the axle as it anesthetized through the aboriginal and additional collimators assorted with the ambit amid them in a address that could be explained alone if the alpha particles were absolutely broadcast somewhat by the metal foil; Meitner begin that the drop added with the diminutive accumulation of the metal atoms. In a few years, alpha drop would advance Rutherford to the nuclear atom; Meitner’s was an aboriginal archetype of such experiments, cleverly brash and anxiously executed. She submitted her address to the Physikalische Zeitschrift on 29 June 1907.
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